


Innocenti (or, The Island of Discarded ADAs)

by rellkelltn87



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Attempted Murder, Biphobia, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Characters Who Don't Think They're Anything-Phobic, Crying, Dreams and Nightmares, Ghosts, Gunshot Wounds, Heartbreak, Hospitals, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Latin, Lawyers, Murder, Rafael Barba Is A Lucky Stupid Man, Shot on the Courthouse Steps, as in Lingua Latina, because ghosts only speak Latin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 16:16:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 49,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19254721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rellkelltn87/pseuds/rellkelltn87
Summary: Barba is shot on the courthouse steps after his trial. Although Aaron Householder immediately confesses to the crime, the case against him quickly begins to unravel. Carisi finds himself connected to the case in ways he could not have expected. Benson and Barba's relationship develops.Also, Barba yachts his way out of purgatory.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Revised for story and pacing from version originally posted in March. My use of the characters Kevin Mulrooney and Sheila Porter is warranted by the talent of the actors who portrayed them and not with their creator. 
> 
> As Carisi says later in this story, "Life is short, Lieu. We want to believe it’s long and we can change our minds about things in cycles every 12 years or whatever, but we don’t know how much time we’ve got, and we don’t know how much time we’re wasting, so what I’ve learned is, you can’t live according to the judgments of other people who are aiming at their own real narrow version of heaven and nothing else.” 💫❤️💜💙💫🥔🐼
> 
> Happy reading. And tip your fic writers in the form of not copy-paste plagiarizing their work, kiddies. 💫

Rafael Barba was dreaming about baseball, which was very out of character for him, and he was able to rather lucidly reflect on that fact as he stood in the outfield of Yankee Stadium, his right arm held high up in the air, waiting to catch the fly ball improbably hurtling towards him.

When he jumped up to catch the ball, Barba landed on his back, resulting in a home run for the batter. Yankee Stadium was immediately re-named after a bank, and the fans booed Barba mercilessly. 

But Barba couldn’t move. He felt ice-cold water creeping onto the field, up near his feet, and then past his thighs. A wave suddenly hit his stomach; finally, the cold water on his skin startled him awake.

He expected to wake up in bed. When he opened his eyes, however, he saw a stretch of blue sky above him. 

There was ice-cold water and wet, muddy sand beneath him.

He closed his eyes again, hoping that when he opened them he’d be in the bed he’d slept in for the last ten years, in the Brooklyn condominium that he was selling so he could move on from Manhattan SVU, from all the damage his most recent mistake had caused.

“Rafael,” a woman’s voice said. “Open your eyes. You’re safe.”

He blinked his eyes open once more and saw a blonde woman in a sundress, sunglasses, and an oversized hat standing over him. If he didn’t know better, he’d have sworn that she was former SVU Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cabot.

“Casey,” she called, “he’s awake. He’s still a little confused. Come help me.”

With that, Barba found his more recent predecessor Casey Novak standing over him too. Novak wore a black bathing suit, her legs partially covered by a green wrap-around. Barba closed his eyes one more time, praying he’d wake up in bed.

When he felt Cabot’s and Novak’s hands grasping his arms, he decided he might as well explore this lucid dream, if it was indeed a lucid dream. He feared it wasn’t.

If he’d been found guilty and sent to prison, where he’d been killed by a corrections officer or a prisoner trying to get on a CO’s good side — a likely possibility, a persistent fear throughout his trial, given the death threats that had followed his prosecution of Gary Munson — then at least, mercifully, he had no memory of his own murder.

But he _remembered_ the not guilty verdict. He remembered embracing Olivia Benson in the gallery afterwards. He remembered the relief he’d felt that he was not going to be thrown to the wolves, to Munson’s buddies from the COs union, the relief that he hadn’t been sentenced to his inevitable murder in prison, followed by the canyon of guilty conscience that had opened up between him and the woman who’d become his best friend.

For now, he was barefoot, in nothing but a purple bathing suit, with sand in his toes and in his hair.

“Welcome,” Novak said, brushing some of the sand off Barba’s back, “to the Island of Discarded ADAs.”

“I assume that’s a euphemism for purgatory?”

“Oh no,” Cabot said, “we’re about ten miles off the coast of Florida.”

“So I’m free to leave?” Barba asked, slowly turning his head to examine what appeared to be a beach resort.

Cabot pushed her sunglasses higher up on her face and looked down at her own bare feet. “Well,” was all she said.

“So not purgatory at all, then.”

“No! This isn’t hell. I told you, you left SVU, which means you now live on the Island of Discarded ADAs.”

“That seems … improbable.”

Barba spotted another woman with sunglasses, hair twisted up into a bun, hurrying towards him. “Thank goodness,” she said.

“Connie?” Barba asked, recognizing the former assistant to the EADA.

Her face brightened into a wide smile. “I’m so glad you’re here. For ten years, I’ve been pretty much the only ADA who can talk to the ghosts.”

Barba raised one eyebrow.

“Because ghosts only speak Latin,” Cabot said, as if she’d expected Barba to know that already. “Connie’s managed to combine Spanish with Law Latin to get the ghosts to talk to her.”

“Everybody else here claims they’re too busy to learn Spanish or Latin,” Rubirosa explained, a hint of a smirk forming on her lips, “but it’s really because they’re all afraid of ghosts.”

Barba shoved his hands into the pockets of his bathing suit to hide the fact that they were trembling.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of ghosts too. It’s just Claire Kincaid, Alex Borgia, and Sonya Paxton. They’re nice. A little pissed off about how they were killed, but they’re nice, I promise.”

“Mulrooney’s fluent in Latin now,” Novak commented.

Rubirosa laughed. “That’s because the ghosts are the only people here who’ll talk to him.”

“The presence of ghosts,” Barba said, his forehead wrinkling in concentration, “strongly suggests to me that this isn’t an island off the coast of Florida.”

Cabot waved a hand in his face. “There’s no room for legal arguments.”

“That’s … not a legal argument. How do I get out of here?”

“Just come with us,” Novak said.

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.” Barba looked out at the ocean, wondering if he could swim to the Florida coastline, if there was a Florida coastline to swim to at all. “I’m going to —”

“Ocean’s full of jellyfish,” Cabot warned. “The really big ones filled with poison and the really small ones that’ll swim up into your crotch.”

“You know what? If this is hell, I probably deserve it.”

“Don’t feel so sorry for yourself,” Cabot said, not confirming his suspicions either way. “You’ll show him around, Connie? Casey and I haven’t had dinner yet. We’re heading over to the steakhouse.”

“I’ve got it,” Rubirosa assured them.

“Thanks.”

Cabot and Novak hurried off ahead of them, and Rubirosa patted Barba on the back with an open hand, leading him towards what looked like a beach motel with a wraparound wooden deck, a bar extending off to one side. “There’s an adjustment period,” she said. “Everyone here used to be a workaholic.”

Barba licked his lower lip. “The addiction to workahol is tough to break.”

Rubirosa smiled, a hint of sadness behind her eyes. “See? You’ll do fine.”

“So what exactly are we supposed to do here all day?”

“It’s like being on vacation.”

“Forever?”

“Something like that.”

“Are we allowed to visit home?”

“You’ll have to talk to Alex,” Rubirosa said. “She explains it best.”

“Cabot or Borgia?”

“Cabot. With Borgia — Claire and Sonya too — they can understand a little Spanish, if you throw in some Law Latin phrases and speak in a sort of Italian accent. They’re nice, though. Cabot and Novak, Carmichael and Southerlyn too, have hangups about ghosts.”

Barba followed Rubirosa up the wooden steps, surprised that the soles of his feet didn’t sense any warmth or splinters beneath him. “How long have you been here?” he asked.

“Ten years, give or take.”

“You worked a case with us once, as a federal prosecutor,” Barba commented. “I remember because Liv was annoyed that the feds were involved.”

“Alex will explain more tomorrow.”

“Connie, tell me now, please,” he said, trying in vain to modulate his voice so he didn’t sound like he was begging. “I’m … confused.”

“You’re scared,” she said. “I told you, the island takes some adjustment.” She led him in through the front door of the motel. “You’re in Room 201. The far end of the hallway upstairs.”

“No key?”

“You just have to tap on the door. If it’s your room it’ll let you in automatically.”

“Esto es lo que — hell? Purgatory?”

“No.”

 _Limbo_ , he thought, shuddering when he remembered for a split second what that constituted.

“Are there clothes in the room?” he asked, aiming for a more practical question.

“No, the bathing suits dry as soon as you take them off. One of the other guys, Mulrooney, has a T-shirt that he wears with his. I don’t know how or why we get the clothes we get. Alex Cabot knows a lot, though. Claire, too, if you can decipher what she’s saying.”

As they approached the stairs to the second floor, Barba returned to his original line of questioning. “How is it possible that you’ve been here for ten years but you worked with us five years ago?”

“Let Alex explain tomorrow. Meet us on the deck for breakfast.”

“What are you protecting me from?”

Rubirosa sighed resignedly. “You’re allowed to go back for one week every three to five years, but only if you — this is what it says in the handbook — make Olivia Benson sad or angry for at least 24 hours.”

“That’s cruel.” Barba started his march up the steps, turning around once to look back down at Rubirosa. “Do not mention Olivia Benson’s name in this place ever again. She is too good for whatever is happening here.”

“Rafael, I’m sorry.” Rubirosa leaned against the banister, her big, sympathetic eyes turned upwards toward Barba. “Those are the rules. I went back for a while, got to visit some friends, but I had to —”

“Make Olivia’s life difficult first.” Barba shook his head. “Good night. I’d say “I’ll see you in the morning,” but I’d like to believe that I’m going to wake up in my bed at home.”

He went upstairs, left his bathing suit in the bathroom, and checked the closets and drawers for more clothing. There was none.

Maybe you had to return to New York and disappoint Olivia Benson a certain number of times before you earned a T-shirt or at least a pair of flip-flops. But if disappointing Olivia Benson earned you clothing on this island, then Barba should have been welcomed with a closet full of suits and dresser drawers overflowing with ten thousand socks. 

He dozed off for a while, and when he woke up, he knew he was still in the same godforsaken motel room, on the same godforsaken island. It was dark outside, but because there was no clock or television in the room, there was no indication of how much time had passed.

His bathing suit was dry, so he put it back on and walked out into the hall. He noticed that he didn’t shiver.

Outside on the deck, he wasn’t cold at all despite the cool breeze in the air.

“I’m sorry, Liv,” he said, half to himself, “I love you.”

He hoped that wherever she was — wherever he was — she felt his _I love you_.

He noticed a light on the far end of the deck, and as he approached he saw an outdoor bar, fully stocked, surrounded by tables. “If you’ve got a good 15-year scotch, I’ll take it,” Barba told the bartender, who was facing away from him, “but I’ve got no money in my pockets.”

The bartender turned around. Barba recognized her from the papers, and from a picture in the hallway leading to the DA’s office: ADA Claire Kincaid.

“Scoticis cupam?” Kinicaid guessed.

His cohort of discarded ADAs weren’t kidding: the ghosts only spoke Latin.

“Sí,” he said, following the word with a nod when her expression revealed that she didn’t understand.

“There’s no word for yes in Latin,” a voice said behind him.

A dark haired man in a bathing suit similar to Barba’s and a white V-neck t-shirt approached the bar and began talking to Kincaid in rapid Latin. He looked uncannily familiar, but Barba couldn’t place his face.

Kincaid poured Barba a tumbler of scotch and slid it his way.

“Gracias,” he said, and she seemed to understand that. He wondered what on earth (if they were on earth) a woman who’d been killed in a drunk driving crash was doing working at a bar.

Maybe she was bored. Maybe tending bar all night helped her forget her fate.

“Kevin Mulrooney,” the man now sitting next to him said.

Barba shook Mulrooney’s hand, fighting back a cringe. He knew the name, he’d recognized it when Novak had mentioned him earlier: a disgraced ADA who’d been convicted of murder. He’d shot the defendant from a case he’d lost years ago, the one which had ground any hope of his promotion at the DA’s office to a halt. Mulrooney blamed then-detective Alex Eames for his downfall, and had attempted to frame her for the murder that he himself had committed.

“The one and only Rafael Barba,” Mulrooney said, an almost-creepy smile forming on his lips. “How the mighty have fallen. I once had a promising career in the DA’s office too.”

“Esse genus ad Rafael,” ADA Sonya Paxton — who he’d worked with once fifteen years ago, when there was a jurisdictional issue with an assault that had happened on the Brooklyn Bridge — came up behind them. “Ille est novum.”

Mulrooney answered her back in what sounded like fluent Latin.

“So you’re the only one who learned the language, I see,” Barba said.

“There’s Connie, who hasn’t really been able to pick any of it up, but she’s the only other person here who’s comfortable talking to the ghosts,” Mulrooney told him. “But you and I, we’ve been through murder trials, we know what it’s like, so we should stick together.”

Barba had no impulse to insist _we’re not the same_ , but he suspected that he should have.

He sipped his scotch and was grateful for the familiar burn in his throat and the warmth in his chest. Kincaid brought Paxton a soda.

“So, uh —” Barba stared into his glass as Paxton sat on the other side of him. “Ms. Paxton, como sales de — ex —”

Mulrooney laughed, conferring with the two ghosts in rapid Latin again. “I’ve been here for almost ten years,” he told Barba. “You know, you can go home again for a week if you —”

“Yes,” he said, “let’s not talk about that.”

Mulrooney translated for the ghosts, who both offered Barba slightly-exaggerated expressions of sympathy. Kincaid laid a hand over her heart, then poured him more whiskey.

“De omnibus nobis,” Paxton said, “tibi adepto vade in domum tuam et saltem duobus annis.”

Mulrooney laughed.

“What’d she say?” Barba asked.

“Of all of us, you should be the one who gets to go home for at least two years.”

“That would indeed reflect the degree to which I’ve made Olivia Benson sad and angry,” Barba said, and Mulrooney translated for Paxton and Kincaid.

Mulrooney downed the rest of his beer, stood, shook Barba’s hand again, and told them he was turning in for the night.

After Mulrooney left, Kincaid pressed her hands to the bar and smiled sadly at Barba. “De lingua Latina non habent satis maledictionem pro Jack McCoy,” she said, and that was close enough to Spanish for him to understand that she was telling him that the Latin language didn’t have enough swear words to describe Jack McCoy. “Non debes esse in reus est caedis.”

He was able to figure that one out too: _You should not have been on trial for murder._

“Dices ad eum de Jamie Ross,” Paxton instructed.

“Ille non intellegunt,” was Kincaid’s response.

Jamie Ross was the only former ADA who wasn’t on the island, Barba guessed. She was a criminal court judge, recently appointed to another ten-year term. 

“Iudex,” Kincaid said, clearly hoping to get the point across.

_Judge._

“Solo salida — camino — ex — aqui?” Barba tried.

“In tantum ut non modo huc missum est,” Paxton said. “Quod ita ex.”

 _Ita ex_ , Barba thought, that must mean _a way out_. Quod ita ex: if there is a way out.

“Gracias,” he told the women.

“Sero in caritate,” Kincaid said sadly. “Paenitet.”

“It’s okay,” Barba said.

He wandered onto the beach. The sand beneath his feet felt neither warm nor cold. He picked up his pace, focusing on the lines of white foam that pointed him to where the Atlantic Ocean — or what Alex Cabot had told him was the Atlantic Ocean — crashed into the shore.

He swam out until an undertow began to carry him parallel to the shore, and then swam with that undertow, hoping it would take him away from the island, rather than back towards it.

Finally, he reached a relatively calm stretch of ocean where he was able to float on his back and rest a while before continuing on. He couldn’t see the island, or any hint of land, or any ship approaching or retreating. So, he looked up at the stars, none of which were familiar. 

“Liv,” he said, the name a sob caught in his throat, “Liv.”


	2. Chapter 2

Barba wasn’t sure how long he’d been floating on his back, staring up at unfamiliar stars, wondering where exactly he _was_ , when he saw a bright light in the distance, what looked like a small ship coming towards him. He knew better than to get his hopes up. By morning, he’d surely be back on the Island of Discarded ADAs, which he was almost certain was neither off the coast of Florida nor in the Atlantic Ocean.

He remembered the not guilty verdict at the end of his trial and the immense relief that followed. 

But guilt tugged at his soul nevertheless, as he recalled the letter of resignation and plane ticket receipt in his dresser drawer.

Some of it was coming back to him, flooding into his memory as the ice-cold waves hit his ears again and again: The speech he’d rehearsed a thousand times in his head, where he planned to tell Liv that she’d changed his life, made him see a black-and-white world in color, but now that he’d broken her heart, disappointed her and everyone else who’d counted on him, he had to move on. He saw the world in too much color now not to move on, was the gist of his argument, what he was going to say to her before he bid her goodbye.

The argument he never not to make.

This is what he remembered of the days before he washed up on the island. This was all he remembered. 

The lights drew closer, and hopelessness loomed near his heart, because if he wasn’t really in the Atlantic Ocean, any ship coming towards him was not coming to save him.

_Rafa, Rafa, stay with me, stay the hell with me._

Liv’s voice, a vague memory.

A hand on his chest.

Liv whispering _I love you_ in his ear.

He couldn’t place these particular memories, if they were memories at all.

_Let me ride with him._

_I don’t know how to put this, Lieutenant, but it doesn’t look good._

_I love you, I love you_ , that was definitely Liv’s voice, but in a timbre he’d never heard before, as if she was crying.

The waves tossed him around, the water choppy because of the approaching ship, which was a personal yacht with Alex Cabot at the helm, Barba noticed as it drew closer.

“Come on, Barba,” Cabot said, throwing down a life vest for him, “it’s like being on vacation every day. Never wearing pants again takes some getting used to, but it’s better than trying to make your way through this.”

“I’ll swim to shore,” he said.

“Rafael, you’re a smart man. There is no shore.”

“And you’re not Alex Cabot.” 

“That’s arguable.”

He grabbed hold of the life vest and let Cabot pull him up on to the deck. There was nothing else in the middle of the ocean, no coastline, no hope of rescue except for the yacht that was going to take him back to the Island of Discarded ADAs.

“I’m sorry, Rafael,” Cabot said, “I really am.”

“Don’t offer me your sympathy. I know this is my only choice.”

In the distance, he heard a wail.

Cabot didn’t react. “Did you hear that?” Barba asked.

“No.”

He recognized the sound, even though he’d never heard it before: it was the sound of Olivia Benson, sobbing.

—

“Mija, que pasó, come here, come here,” Lucia Barba said, hurrying into her son’s half-packed up bedroom to throw her arms around Benson. She lifted a hand to cradle Benson’s head and pull it towards her shoulder. “Shh, sweetheart, it’s okay.” Her attempt to soothe the lieutenant was belied by her own tears.

In her hand, Benson clutched a letter of resignation and a receipt for a plane ticket.

All week, they’d been offered measures of hope that were then withdrawn and sometimes momentarily restored, every few hours, the cycle too quick, leaving everyone who loved Rafael Barba in a constant state of exhausted-but-sleepless fear, of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The doctors at the hospital had asked Lucia to look for a living will, and Benson offered to help, her heart immediately sinking when she saw that his apartment was partially packed up. She’d justified that to herself at first, wondering if he was preparing for the very real possibility that he’d be found guilty of murder and sent to prison. But when she found the letter, the one that indicated that he was planning to resign from the DA’s office, together with a receipt for a plane ticket to Miami, she reflexively became furious at him. He was going to leave. He was going to resign and skip town days after his pyrrhic victory in the Householder case.

But he’d never had the chance to leave.

On the steps outside the courthouse, Aaron Householder had pulled out a pistol and shot Barba through the chest, narrowly missing his heart.

Benson hadn’t let herself cry like this — an all-out wail — in decades, not even after she escaped from William Lewis.

Lucia pushed Benson’s hair away from her face. “They said Rafi’s brain is still working at full power, so we don’t really have anything to worry about just yet.”

“His heart, they said —”

“What happens to his heart is out of our hands now.”

“Did you know he was leaving the DA’s office?”

“He was resigning, then taking a few weeks off to travel.” Lucia kissed the top of Benson’s head, and Benson allowed herself to sink deeper into the embrace. She assumed from Barba’s occasional tales of his childhood that Lucia Barba was almost but not quite as irrevocably flawed as Serena Benson, but the motherly embrace, the real comfort, was exactly what she needed, what she clutched at, in the moment. “I told him he was an idiot for even thinking that he had to move on from you.”

“That’s what he said, he had to move on from me?”

“Idiot.”

“Such an idiot,” Benson said through tears.

“But we love him in spite of his idiocy.”

“The names I’d have called him if he’d actually taken off. But Aaron Householder shouldn’t have taken Rafael’s decision to do such a stupid, idiotic thing away from him.”

“I’m going to burn the letter in the sink,” Lucia announced.

“Why?”

“He needs health insurance, disability coverage. Jack McCoy and company don’t need to know that he was going to resign.”

Benson nodded. “Good point,” she said, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand.

“Do you want company tonight?” Lucia asked. “I can make dinner for you and your son.”

“Lucia, please, you’re going through —”

“I can’t sit at home and worry.”

“Okay. Come over.”

Lucia went to the kitchen and Benson sat at the edge of Barba’s bed, staring at the wall as her tears dried up.

—

The sound of Olivia Benson wailing filled the night sky surrounding Cabot’s yacht.

Barba had just about given in, accepted the fact that he was going to be living on the Island of Discarded ADAs — whatever that meant — for eternity, or at least until some concrete decision was made somewhere about the nature of what he’d done to, or what he’d done for, the Householders.

As they sailed back towards the island, he heard other tears cried in private too: his mother’s, Eddie Garcia’s, Yelina Muñoz’s, Sonny Carisi’s, and although he didn’t remember, he _knew_ what must have happened.

But it was Olivia’s sobs, echoing everywhere, that made him realize how desperately he needed to get back home, back to her, and so, when Cabot let down her guard, briefly leaving the steering room to walk out on the deck, Barba commandeered the yacht.

He pulled heavy rope down from one of the sails, which he used to tie together the steering room’s door handles, effectively locking her out. For all the jokes, all the _points proven_ to the boys in the Bronx about his Harvard-acquired hobbies, one thing was for certain: his yachting skills were helping him to escape a tedious afterlife.

Cabot banged on the doors, trying to break the glass as Barba steered parallel to the sun peeking up over the horizon.

— 

“He’s awake! He’s awake, and he’s talking!” Lucia shouted at Benson, who was cleaning up the table after dinner. She had her mobile phone pressed to her ear with one hand, her other hand waving frantically in front of her face. After she wrapped up her conversation with the doctor, she hurried back towards the dining table to hug Benson. “I’m going to go see him. He’s off the ventilator and _talking_ , the doctor says. They’re taking him for a CAT scan.”

“Good,” Benson said, “good.” Her own optimism and relief were tempered by what had happened to Mike Dodds three years ago, but she refused to let Lucia in on those fears, especially now.

Before she left, Lucia kissed the top of Noah’s head and squeezed Benson’s hand. “Pray for him, all right?” she said. “He’s not out of the woods yet.”

“I know,” Benson said gently.

Lucia kissed Benson’s cheek. “He loves you.”

Benson pursed her lips and tried to smile. Barba wasn’t out of the woods yet, as Lucia had put it, so she wasn’t allowed to be mad at him for what she’d found in his dresser drawer. As soon as he recovered, as soon as he was back to his old self, she’d be furious. She couldn’t wait to be furious.

She texted her squad to let her know that Barba was awake and talking, and she knew they’d wait to celebrate too, given that they’d all been there when Dodds died unexpectedly after a seemingly successful surgery. _It’s different_ , Rollins texted her.

_How?_ she wrote back.

_I don’t know. It has to be. He’s been fighting his way back for a week. It’s like he was desperate to come back to you._

Desperate to come back to her, sure, desperate even though he had a letter of resignation and a plane ticket hidden away in a drawer. Desperate even though he’d told his mother that he was planning to move on.

But she couldn’t be mad at him, not yet. That was cruel and unethical and ridiculous, as Barba himself might say.

The next morning, she received a text that Barba was being transferred out of ICU into a regular hospital room in the afternoon. He was asking for her, Lucia wrote.

She very nearly rolled her eyes before she remembered that she’d spent much of the last week crying over him, over how close they’d all kept coming to losing him.

Rita Calhoun breezed through at around 10, on her way out of accompanying a client to an early-morning interrogation. “I got a message from Lucia,” Rita told Benson. “Thank God that idiot pulled through.”

Benson smiled as best she could.

“Liv,” Rita said, linking arms with Benson and leading her to the back of the squadroom, “Lucia told me you found the letter-that-never-existed and the plane ticket. For the record, I tried to talk him out of it too. The asshole had a whole speech planned.”

“Rita.”

“I know, I know, “give the guy a break,” right. But I said to him, “you do that, you’re going to crush Olivia, and he told me he’d already let you down and I didn’t know what I was talking about.” Rita lowered her voice. “I _always_ know what I’m talking about. Tell me Householder plead guilty.”

“They were waiting to plead him out until —”

Rita closed her eyes for a split second. “Until they knew whether the charge was murder or attempted murder.” She was just as shaken up as everyone else, Benson observed, regardless of how hard she tried to hide it. “Are you seeing him today?”

“After they move him to a room.”

“I saw him a few days ago when he was on the ventilator, and he looked so helpless, not like my asshole friend Rafael at all, and I wanted to shove my high heeled shoe straight through Aaron Householder’s forehead.”

“I know,” Benson said. “I will send Rafael your love, and I’ll find out how soon before we’re allowed to be mad at him.”

“Looking forward to it.”

—

She found Barba sitting up in his hospital bed, suspiciously eyeing the small cups of pureed food set out on the tray in front of him.

“Hey,” she said, taking a few more steps toward the bed, “how are you feeling, Rafa?”

He greeted her with a broad smile. “I’m so glad to see you. And I’m sorry, and, no, you don’t need to forgive me.”

“For what, getting shot in the chest?” she asked, pretending there was nothing else between them.

“Mami told me you found the letter and the —”

“There is no letter.”

“Right.” He poked at something green in one of the cups, smirking in the direction of the tray. “She told me this morning that you found the hypothetical letter and receipt, and —”

“I can’t believe she told you all that less than a day after waking up from being unconscious for a week.”

“She was upset. I told her that I heard you crying and I knew I needed to come home.”

Now Benson was next to the bed, her hand clutching one of the rails. “Home from where?”

“Hell,” he suggested.

“Oh, come on, Rafa.”

“Don’t feel so sorry for myself, I know.”

She laid a hand on his shoulder, just above a square patch of gauze that covered the spot where they’d run a central line through his chest while he was unconscious. The wound from Aaron Householder’s bullet, she knew, was a few inches lower. “We’ll argue later about what you were planning. For now” — she dipped her head to kiss his cheek — “you need to heal.” She tapped his tray table. “At least eat the chocolate pudding.”

Barba rolled his eyes, but obliged.

“Small bites,” Benson warned.

“I’m not Noah.”

“I’ve seen three officers in my 30-year career wind up on a ventilator after being shot. When they take you off, you have to wait for a speech pathologist to clear you before you can chew solid food again. This is me speaking as someone in a career where people get shot in the line of duty.”

“Sorry,” he said, switching to half spoonfuls of chocolate pudding. “If it were up to me, I’d be home already.”

“They’re going to want you in a rehab hospital for a week. Muscle atrophy.”

“I know,” he grumbled. “Nurse already talked to me. You know me, Liv, the pinnacle of patience.”

“Rita wants to visit.”

“I’m here for three more days, in the rehab hospital for a week after that, so she can come punch me in the head whenever she’s ready.”

Benson pulled down the rail on the side of the bed, pushed the tray out of the way, and sat with Barba. “When you recover,” she said, “you and I are going to pick a weekday, go to your place, and lay in bed all day.”

Barba raised his eyebrows.

Smiling, he took her hand in his own IV-ed and bandaged hand. “Lay in bed all day,” he repeated.

“If it gives you a reason to work hard at physical therapy, that can mean whatever you want it to mean,” she promised.

“There was an island,” he told her.

“Hell?”

“There was an island with all the ADAs who’d left Manhattan in disgrace. Alex Cabot seemed to be in charge. That ADA who tried to frame up Captain Eames — the one you said looks like me, but I don’t see it — he was there, too.”

“As long as you realize, in retrospect, it was a dream.”

He squeezed her hand. “I heard you crying. I never want to make you cry.”

“Then why were you —” She cut herself off. “We’ll worry about that later.”

“Why was I planning to leave? You had to deal with my arrest and murder trial. I broke your heart. What kind of man lets his best friend deal with his arrest and murder trial?”

“What kind of man skips town on his alleged best friend, knowing how many people have skipped town on her before?”

“Liv.” He rolled over so he was facing her, tangling his fingers in her hair. “I know, and I regret what would have been the worst decision of my life. I love you. That’s not enough, not yet, but I love you.”

She leaned forward, pressing their foreheads together. “I love you. Almost unconditionally. Never forget that.”

Now his eyes were red. He continued to run his fingers through her hair.

“You just broke the entire DA’s office,” she said, maybe half-joking at best.

“Should have asked Claire Kincaid about that when I had the chance.”

“Claire Kincaid?”

“She was on the island. Couldn’t really talk that much because the ghosts only speak Latin.”

“Rafa, honey,” she said, her hand settled behind his head, “you got that from my mother.”

“Excuse me?”

“My mother used to say that it’s important to learn Latin because if nobody speaks Latin, no one will be able to talk to the ghosts. I must have told you that at least once.”

With tears staining his cheeks, he kissed her again, moving to cradle her face in his hands. “I’m so grateful I made it back. I’m even grateful Aaron Householder shot me, in the sense that I didn’t get the chance to leave you.”

“Okay, stop, you and I shouldn’t be allowed to cry this much,” Benson said, not moving from her position. 

“No.” He kissed her cheek. “I don’t want you to cry.”

“These are happy tears, I think.”

“I love you, Liv. I am a stupid man, but a lucky stupid man who yachted his way out of hell to get back to you.”

“A myth for the ages. Here,” she said, dragging the tray table back and slowly rolling herself into a sitting position, “eat. I know it’s disgusting —”

“I’ve had the tasting menu at Per Se. I don’t think I can handle pureed green beans.”

“You need to get your strength back, Rafa. You and I, we have a long, joyous life ahead of us.”

—

“She found the letter and the receipt, she realized you were going to skip town and break her heart, so you got to stay for a week.” Kevin Mulrooney shrugged one shoulder up to his ear, took an open-mouthed swallow of white wine, and pursed his lips so intently that he looked like an NYPD-detective-framing duck. “It was nice of them to let you go back so early.”

Barba clutched his tumbler of scotch and rubbed his eyes, avoiding the gaze of the disgraced ADA on the barstool next to his. “Am I dead?” he asked. “Is she grieving for me?”

“There are different scenarios.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Claire Kincaid came over with more whiskey, refilling Barba’s glass. She said something in Latin that Barba couldn’t understand, but he could hear how careful her explanation was, and he could see the wistfulness in her eyes. 

“Translate,” Barba demanded, flinging his left hand in the air near Mulrooney’s face. 

“She says the, uh, “real-life” scenario is that you died on the courthouse steps within minutes of being shot.”

“Non est in dolore,” Kincaid assured him.

“You weren’t in —”

“I know what it means,” Barba snapped. “I wasn’t in pain. But what about my mother, my friends? What about Liv?”

“Liv is in a separate category from “friends”?” 

“Shut your mouth, Mr. Mulrooney. You don’t get to talk about Liv here, not now, not ever.”

“We talk about Olivia Benson a lot here,” Mulrooney said, repeating the statement in Latin for Kincaid’s benefit.

Kincaid shot Mulrooney what might be described as a death glare. “Scio,” she said, patting Barba’s hand, “est non aequum.”

“I don’t know how to say this in Latin, but you deserved a lot better, too, Claire.”

Mulrooney translated for Kincaid, then turned to Barba, almost as if expecting him to say that the creepy former ADA who’d served prison time for an actual, clear-cut murder (and had allegedly sawed off his victim’s genitals out of anger that a single not guilty verdict had stalled his prosecutorial career, why was Barba drinking with this guy again?) had also been done wrong. 

Barba pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Quam?” Kincaid asked.

“Por que — cur — cur no soy un fantasma? Uh … espiritu?”

Mulrooney laughed. “Ille vult scire quid est non exspiravit,” he told Kincaid. Turning back to Barba: “Right? You’re asking why you’re not a ghost? Because that confuses me too.”

Kincaid shrugged in Barba’s direction. 

“We all went to law school, even you, Mulrooney,” Barba said, “and Claire, tu es Harvard alum, como yo — tamquam me — so we should be able to reason this out.”

Mulrooney smirked into his wine glass. “There is no rhyme or reason to any of this.”

“Kevin!” Kincaid warned. “Nescio quid dicis illi, sed —”

“I was going to leave Liv with a speech about her changing my life and a kiss on the cheek or the forehead. I was wrong. I know that now, I even felt it in the pit of my stomach then, too. I was _wrong_ , and even if I’m fated to endure cruel and unusual punishment, the people I love should not be.” He heard his own voice break at _the people I love_ , and for a split second he thought not only of Liv but of Noah, the boy who called him Uncle Rafa, how Liv must have had to sit him down and explain what happened.

Noah had been through enough. So had Liv. Whatever forces had decided that this should be Barba’s fate were excessively cruel. 

A song lyric, _If I leave you it doesn’t mean I love you any less_ , sprang briefly to mind, and as the song played in his head, he had to will tears back into his eyes. This was not a safe place to show weakness. But that was what he wished he could tell Liv: _If I leave you it doesn’t mean I love you any less_. I didn’t want to leave. It was out of my control. If it were up to me, I would not have left you like this, I would not have left you scared, I would not have let you see me die, I would not —

Mulrooney laid a hand on Barba’s shoulder. “Don’t touch me!” he shouted, and he had to cover his eyes with one hand, because the tears were falling regardless of how hard he tried to resist them. 

“Okay,” Mulrooney said, backing away.

Barba’s eyes flew open into darkness. 

He wanted to go home, back to Liv.

It took him a few more seconds to realize that he was in Liv’s apartment, in her bed, and she was next to him, whispering “shh” into the space between them.

“It’s two in the morning,” she said. “You’re safe. Do you want to sit up?”

“Yes,” he said, an uncanny sense of relief washing over his body when he heard the sound of his own voice.

She helped him into a sitting position, steadying him by resting her hands on his shoulders, which were bare because the undershirts he usually slept in irritated the yet-to-be removed stitches near his ribcage and the scar tissue forming near his collarbone. Reality was setting back in. He was alive, recovering. The island was a nightmare, as it had always been. 

His face crumpled and he started to cry, the same tears he’d tried so hard to resist inside the dream. “You’re safe,” she reminded him again, rubbing his back with an open hand. 

The tears wouldn’t stop. Maybe it was withdrawal from the pain meds they’d had him on in the hospital, maybe it was post-traumatic stress, because even though he couldn’t remember anything following the not guilty verdict, he remembered waking up with a tube down his throat, and he _remembered_ hearing Liv wail as the yacht sailed back to the island.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry I almost left you.”

“I thought we worked that out. We said we’d both move on together.”

“Not that. I’m sorry I almost left you when —”

“Rafa, none of that is your fault. That’s all on Aaron Householder.”

“I started it. I set the whole thing in motion when I interfered in his family’s case.”

“Victims are not allowed to blame themselves on my watch.”

“Come on, Liv, if it was anybody else, you’d have begged the DA’s office to see the fact that someone who wasn’t a family member or doctor flipped the switch on Householder’s son without his consent as a mitigating circumstance. You’d have begged for leniency on his behalf.”

“I don’t beg.”

A smile smile formed on his lips. “You ask,” he said. Repeatedly. Determinedly. Persistently.”

“I love you,” was her answer.

“I love you too. I’m glad I’m here to tell you that.”

“How about I get you a glass of water, and in the morning, you call Dr. Lindstrom’s office to set up an intake appointment?”

“I have so many doctors appointments coming up and —”

“I’m not letting you let this thing snowball.”

He leaned against the headboard and opened his arms to her. She hugged him, carefully resting her head near his collarbone. “Determinedly,” he said. “Persistently.”

“In a few weeks I’ll be annoying you into prosecuting unprosecutable cases again.”

“Liv, you won’t.”

She lifted her head. “What do you mean?”

“We’ve declared our love for one another and have been sharing a bed for the last two nights. We have to disclose. We won’t be able to work together anymore.”

“Oh. That’s right.”

“And you,” he said, dipping his head to kiss her lips, “promised me a whole day in bed that can mean whatever I want it to mean.”

“As soon as you’re fully on the mend,” she reminded him. “That’s our deal. And that includes your psychological health.”

“You are persistent.”

“Always.”

She went to the kitchen and returned with a glass of water. Barba took a drink and set the glass on the night table, then leaned over to kiss her cheek, her jawbone, and a sensitive spot on her neck, one he’d discovered when they’d briefly canoodled on a couch in the rehab hospital a few days ago.

“What’cha doing?” she said.

“Not sleeping.”

“You’re recovering from a gunshot wound. I’m not fucking you to sleep.”

Barba laughed for the first time in weeks, maybe months. “I like this side of you,” he admitted.

She curled up next to him. “You really can’t sleep?”

“I’m tired, but — I keep dreaming about that stupid island, and — I have a ridiculous, not-Harvard-Law-worthy fear that I died on the courthouse steps, and that — that’s what I meant about being sorry I left. It’s why I keep fighting to get off that island in my dreams, why I was fighting so hard to — why I must have been fighting so hard to survive.”

She scooted up on the pillow so she could pet his hair, which at this time of night was cowlicked in seventeen different directions. They were face-to-face, together. “You’re allowed to feel guilty about what you were planning to do after your trial, but you are not allowed to feel guilty that Householder shot you.” She kissed the tears off his cheeks. “Not on my watch.”

He wasn’t sure how long it would last, but for the moment, with Liv next to him, one hand in his hair and the other on his arm, he felt safe.


	3. Chapter 3

After the not guilty verdict, after Barba was absolved of murder two by a jury of his peers, after the special prosecutor — who’d special-prosecuted him until he cried on the stand — scowled in defeat, Benson hugged Barba, drawing him to her. His trial, the worst month of his life, was over. They could move on. She’d finally take him up on that drink, or that celebratory steak, the one that was definitely intended as a date. Barba would explain himself. He’d apologize. She’d stop him before the groveling began. They would move on. 

They’d just walked out of the courthouse and barely had time to look down the steps at the crowd of reporters gathered below when she heard two gunshots and a series of screams. Benson drew her own weapon as she reached out an arm to protect Barba, but he was already on the ground, bleeding from the bullet that had struck his ribcage. 

She remembered whispering _Stay with me, Rafa, stay with me_ as his eyes, desperate and sad, searched hers. She remembered two officers tackling Aaron Householder to the ground at the top of the steps. She remembered pressing her hand to the hole in Barba’s chest, and she remembered Householder, flat on his stomach, with the weapon an inch in front of his right hand, loudly declaring his own guilt, screaming about how he hoped Barba suffered.

She remembered an officer using a glove to pick up and bag the pistol.

And then, the next clear memory Benson had was the paramedic saying _I don’t know how to tell you this, Lieutenant, but it doesn’t look good._

For six days, as news about Barba’s critical condition cycled back and forth too quickly — one moment the doctors would say he was waking up, the next they’d be certain his heart would give out within hours — Benson worked, or tried to work, avoided news reporters, and wept into her pillow at night as she worried about Barba, wondering if he was in pain, if he was frightened. She struggled to figure out how she’d explain to Noah what had happened to the man he knew as Uncle Rafa.

Aaron Householder’s hands were clean. 

The memory came in like a flash sometimes when she got into a rhythm at work. 

But she’d been trying to keep pressure on Barba’s wound, her eyes and ears registering little more than the confusion of the scene around them. 

From her probably-skewed perspective, Aaron Householder’s hands looked clean.

Thirty years of experience, more shootouts and murders than most detectives had ever encountered: Householder’s hands were cleaner than they should have been for a man who’d fired at least twice.

But she was in the middle of a traumatic situation. She was a bad witness. Her memory’s claims could not be trusted.

Householder had confessed three times: once at the scene, again with a _can we just get this over with_ when he was brought directly to One Police Plaza, and a third time when his lawyer arrived.

Jack McCoy was waiting to see whether he’d have to charge Householder with murder, or with attempted murder.

Benson was a bad, traumatized witness and what she saw must have meant nothing. Householder confessed three times, none of them under duress, and during the most recent confession he had a defense attorney sitting next to him.

And then it didn’t matter, because Lucia Barba called and asked if she could help search her son’s apartment for a living will, and all Benson found there was a letter of resignation and a printed-out receipt for a plane ticket to Miami.

The discovery that Barba was planning to leave the DA’s office and New York City after his trial very nearly broke Benson.

And then he was awake again, and recovering, and jogging on a treadmill at a rehab hospital, then staying with her, in her bed, struggling with nightmares as the wound near his ribcage continued to heal, and she forgave him.

_Come on, Liv, if it was anybody else, you’d have begged the DA’s office to see the fact that someone who wasn’t a family member or doctor flipped the switch on Householder’s son without his consent as a mitigating circumstance. You’d have begged for leniency on his behalf._

Barba was right, but Benson was certain that the flash of memory — the image of Householder’s hands — was wrong, even if Householder had never had a gun registered to him in his life, even if his weapon of choice in the initial kidnapping case that had brought them to this point was a paintball gun, even if the way he’d held the paintball gun that afternoon suggested to her that he’d never fired its counterpart, and that even standing with a pistol ten feet away, he’d come awfully close to Barba’s heart for someone who —

But the attempted murder wasn’t her case, and the homicide detectives in charge surely had more details about Aaron Householder’s means and motive than she did. That’s what she told herself as she comforted the prosecutor who suffered nightmares as he slept next to her in the week following his release from the hospital.

—

The unmistakeable sound of Rita Calhoun’s voice echoed outside Benson’s office as she was preparing to leave for the evening. “You can’t just walk in there and interview a police lieutenant,” Calhoun said accusingly. “You’re a partner at one of the state’s top ten law firms. Andy, I doubt you do your own legwork like this. Are you trying to intimidate her? She’s been through enough. Rafael has been through enough.”

There was a knock on the door in spite of Calhoun’s protests. “Lieutenant Benson,” a man’s voice said, “my name is —”

The door flew open, Calhoun’s hand firmly on the doorknob, and a dark-haired man of about 50, at least two inches above six feet, dressed in what must have been a designer gray wool suit, stumbled in. He glared at Calhoun as he smoothed out his jacket. “Lieutenant Benson,” he repeated, approaching her desk and setting his briefcase on a chair, “my name is André Carvalho, I’m with Rodrigo and Gardner in —”

“In upstate New York,” Calhoun interrupted. “This isn’t even his turf.”

“And I am representing Aaron Householder.”

“Okay,” Benson said, standing and holding out her hands, “what is going on here?”

“Andy is a friend of ours from Harvard and Mr. Householder has a wealthy aunt on the Upper East Side. And Mr. Householder withdrew his guilty plea this morning.” Calhoun turned to Carvalho. “This is outrageous. A betrayal.”

“What’s outrageous is that Aaron Householder has never fired anything more than a paintball gun and was diagnosed with osteoarthritis in his right hand a few months ago, a result of his having broken that hand in five places when he was hit by a bicycle in college, and in spite of having all that factual information, Mr. Householder’s confession and guilty plea were accepted without question.”

“Take it up with homicide,” Benson said.

“You are defending the man who tried to kill Rafael,” Calhoun told Carvalho. “You are defending the man who almost succeeded at killing Rafael.”

“I could bring out a laundry list of the “upstanding citizens” you’ve defended over the years, Rita.”

“This is personal, and you know it. You were disappointed in Rafael for what he did, and you’re choosing to take it out on him in the worst way possible.”

“Lieutenant Benson,” Carvalho said, “can you tell me what you saw immediately before and after Rafael was shot?”

“Olivia, you don’t have to tell him anything,” Calhoun said before Benson could answer. “He has the statement you gave to homicide on the day of the shooting, he has the statements you gave when Householder was formally charged, and you should not speak to him without an NYPD representative present.”

“Do you stand by the statements you gave to the homicide detectives?” Carvalho asked.

“Yes, firmly,” Benson said, even though she could not get the probably-false memory of Householder’s clean hands out of her mind.

Witnesses, particularly witnesses in trials where the stakes were extraordinarily high, tended to misremember events in the weeks and months following the trauma because of self-doubt, because of fear of an incorrect memory putting an innocent person away for life. She was almost certain that was the reason why she kept flashing back on Aaron Householder’s hands.

“He confessed, Andy,” Calhoun said, “three times. And he entered a guilty plea.”

“He took credit for the murder he wished he’d committed.”

“You and Rafael have been friends for more than twenty-five years. Does he know you’re representing Householder? Does he know you convinced him to withdraw the guilty plea?”

“I’m doing what’s right,” Carvalho said. “The investigation into the attempted murder of Rafael Barba needs to be reopened.”

“Bullshit,” was Calhoun’s response.

Benson replayed the events of that horrific February afternoon for herself: Householder had left almost immediately after the foreperson read the verdict, whereas Barba had hung back for a few minutes to talk to Dworkin and embrace Benson. They didn’t see Householder again until Barba was shot; Benson remembered this clearly because she’d seen Maggie Householder in the hallway by herself.

Aaron told the detectives that he’d left the pistol in his car, parked on the street, and had gone to retrieve it as soon as the verdict came down. This gelled with what Benson had seen immediately after the trial ended. 

She couldn’t help but wonder, though, what the chances were of Householder finding street parking so close to his destination in Lower Manhattan.

But surely the officers on the scene, or at least the homicide detectives who’d followed up, had towed the car to an NYPD garage and noted where it was parked. 

She didn’t have access to any records related to the shooting and its investigation because she was a witness, and because she was whispering _I love you, I love you_ to the victim as he was taken away on a stretcher.

But they must have followed up on Householder’s confession. At SVU, Benson had seen many cases where a parent confessed on behalf of a child, a few where a child had confessed to protect a parent, a spouse confessing to a crime committed by the person they’d sworn to love for better or worse, and, a handful of times, a legally-innocent person taking credit for a crime they hadn’t committed. So of course homicide had seen similar incidents, and of course they hadn’t taken Householder’s confession at face value.

Even Maggie, who Benson was one hundred and one percent sure she’d seen in the hall before Barba was shot — she’d looked relieved, perhaps because Barba was not going to prison for charges she never wanted pressed in the first place — claimed she saw her estranged husband pointing a pistol at Barba.

But Maggie’s account was problematic too: she was furious at Aaron for going along with Jack McCoy’s plan to charge Barba with murder. She couldn’t believe that the kind prosecutor who’d helped her out on the worst day of her life was facing anything more than a fine, a suspended sentence, and a rebuke from the bar association.

Why would she make a statement that would lead to Aaron being unfairly charged with murder, then?

Ethics weren’t perfect. Memory wasn’t perfect either, Benson reminded herself.

“Mr. Carvalho,” Benson said, “you’re going to work with my statements to the homicide detectives investigating the case, and you will stick solely to those until I’m on the stand. And please keep in mind that Rafael has been home for less than a week, after seven days unconscious and nineteen days total in the hospital, so you might want to consider how taking on Householder’s defense is going to affect your alleged friend of twenty-five years.”

“I’m doing what’s right,” Carvalho insisted once more, picking up his briefcase on his way out of Benson’s office.


	4. Chapter 4

“Sonny! You made it!” Bella Carisi stood up from her parents’ couch, where she’d been sitting with her husband and their three-year-old son, throwing her arms around her brother before he could take off his coat. “We gotta talk,” she said into his ear, “now.”

“Can I at least say hi to Ma first?”

“No,” Bella said, linking her arm with his as soon as he hung his coat on the rack near the front door. She led him towards the staircase, up to the storage room that had once been his childhood bedroom. “We gotta talk now.”

“You okay? Tommy’s okay?”

“Everybody’s fine, except maybe our idiot sister, who’s introducing us to her fiancé tonight.”

Carisi cringed. “Please tell me you’re talking about Teresa.”

“I wish.”

“Gina’s divorce was only finalized, what, three months ago?”

“Yeah. Real lady’s man, this guy,” Bella said. “He’s a paralegal for her divorce attorney.”

“Does he know he’s fiancé number seven?”

“According to Gina, he’s technically only number two, on account of her being married once.”

“That makes a whole lot of sense,” Carisi said, rolling his eyes. “How long’ve they been engaged? How come she didn’t say anything on the group text?”

“‘Cause we also have a separate group text without you in it, the one where we don’t want our “I’m-a-cop-and-a-lawyer” brother on our cases about everything. Listen, we figured this one would blow over before it got to the point of Gina bringing him by the house, but … it didn’t.”

“How bad?”

“Guy did eight years of a ten year sentence for murder.”

“Fuck,” Carisi said, rubbing his eyes. “You should have told me earlier.”

“Yeah? And what would you have done? You and I aren’t exactly on good terms with any parole officers’ unions.”

“So what do you expect me to do about it now?”

“I don’t know. She’s been head-over-heels with this asshole. Sonny, he shot a guy on the beach at close range and cut his balls off while dressed as a woman named Gabrielle who looked like the police detective he thought tanked his career.”

Carisi had investigated some bizarre cases during his time with SVU, but none of them held a candle to the story Bella had just told him.

“And again, you couldn’t have said something a month ago?”

“She kept it from me and Teresa. They’ve been together a year, since a couple weeks after she and Louie first filed for divorce. Says she knew we wouldn’t like him.”

Carisi held out his hands. “Well.”

“I’m usually all for letting Gina make her own bad decisions, but, Sonny —”

“We’re sure this guy — did — what he was convicted of?”

“Uh-huh. Very open about it, too.”

“You met him?” Carisi asked, exasperated.

“Three weeks ago.” Bella reached over and touched her brother’s forearm, tilting her head and screwing her face into an expression of sympathy. “A couple days after your ADA was shot.”

“You could have said something then, it would have been fine.”

“Sonny.”

“What?” 

“I know you had some kind of long-simmering crush on him, and I know you must have been —”

“Bella! I’m 38 years old. I don’t talk in terms of “crushes,” and I’m never letting you get me drunk again.”

“You’re like the polar opposite of Gina. She gets engaged to every guy she meets, and you don’t pursue any leads. Whatever happened with Amanda?”

“Amanda is involved with someone again.”

“Aww, Sonny.” She was clearly reading a lot into his statement. “You can’t catch a break, can you?”

“I don’t want to talk about me. Give me this guy’s name, I’ll make some calls.”

“Kevin Mulrooney. Former ADA himself. He got disbarred, obviously, but still likes to hang around lawyers for some reason.”

“Goddamnit, what is it with ADAs and murder these days?”

“What Barba did wasn’t really murder and you know it. Isn’t that what they were saying on the news back in February, that the DA never should have charged him the way they did? I felt bad for Barba. He went out of his way to help Tommy. He goes out of his way for people.”

“Rarely,” Carisi huffed.

“I thought he helped you get ready for the Bar.”

“He didn’t have consent from both custodial parents when he flipped that switch. I know the law. He could have easily helped Maggie Householder push the divorce and the court order through faster. I was worried about him, praying he’d pull through after he got shot, which he certainly didn’t deserve and Householder should absolutely rot for that, but, Bella, you don’t know how I looked up to him, how he was a role model for me, how much this decision let me down, threw me off.”

“I’m sorry.” Bella moved to hug him. “This was why Teresa and I didn’t let you in on what was happening with Gina. I said to Teresa, just trust me, Sonny’s hurting.”

“What’d you tell her I was hurting over?”

“When she asked, I said _just trust me_ over and over again.”

“Like they say, no heroes.”

“You ever need to talk, you know you can always call me up. I swear I won’t leak anything to the backchannel group text.”

“So what do you need me to do?” Carisi asked. “You need me to punch this guy in the head?”

“We all know that’s Teresa’s job in this family.”

Carisi laughed. “I’ll look into this guy’s history, all right?”

“The story he told us is that his life went completely downhill after he fucked up one case, and he knew the guy on trial was guilty, he knew he’d murdered his first wife regardless of the verdict.”

“I didn’t go to law school for sixty years to shrug and say, “oh, he’s just a prosecutor getting himself some vigilante justice, la-de-da.” Barba doesn’t get off the hook with me for that, and this asshole Mulrooney, he absolutely doesn’t get off the hook.”

“I’m just telling you what he told me and Teresa.”

Carisi heard the doorbell ring, followed by a series of greetings and introductions downstairs. Bella breathed deep. “Here we go,” she said.

In the living room, they found Gina and Kevin Mulrooney handing Joanne Carisi their coats, and Dominick Carisi Sr. reaching out to shake Mulrooney’s hand.

Sonny Carisi had not slept much in the past month. 

This ADA-turned-revenge-murderer was as a pale as a sheet of paper, with shoepolish-colored hair that curled a bit where it should have been trimmed weeks ago, and there were dark circles beneath his eyes, but putting all of that aside, his resemblance to Rafael Barba was striking.

His teeth were bigger, broader somehow. His eyes didn’t bulge out of his head in quite the same way Barba’s did. He was maybe half an inch shorter, fifteen pounds thinner. But the resemblance seemed to Carisi’s exhausted brain, more than coincidence.

Mulrooney’s affect was entirely different, Carisi noted, somehow simultaneously creepy and and forlorn.

Halfway through dinner, he was explaining to the family how he’d let himself go unchecked for a long time after his prosecutorial downfall, and that his prison sentence had changed him.

“Yeah, sure,” Carisi said, “and the Verrazano Bridge is made of cupcakes.”

“Sonny!” Gina snapped.

He turned to Bella and Teresa for support, but they simply shrugged in his direction.

“Leave me out here in the cold why don’t you,” he mumbled into his wine glass.

“I understand if you have your doubts,” Mulrooney said, clearing his throat, “and I’m not saying I’m innocent, or blameless, or —” He cut himself off, blinking what must have been a hundred times before excusing himself to go to the bathroom.

“You’re scaring the crap out of him,” Gina said before dramatically clinking her fork against her plate and rushing off to calm her agitated fiancé.

“Give the guy a chance, for God’s sake,” Joanne said. “He was trying to explain himself.”

“He cut off somebody’s balls,” Bella half-whispered.

“After he _murdered_ the guy,” Carisi added. “I thought you were going to back me up.”

“Not like we see you bringing anybody home,” Joanne huffed in her son’s direction. “You could at least once in a while —”

“You want for Sonny and Teresa to bring home murderers too, Ma?” Bella interrupted.

Dominick Sr. Hummed as he finished chewing. “We warmed up to Tommy eventually.”

“Oh, come on,” Bella said, patting her husband’s arm, “Tommy’s not a murderer.”

“Also never cut anybody’s balls off,” Tommy said, not looking up from his plate.

“I don’t know,” Teresa said, “the way he was talking before, I almost buy his story that he’s moved on.”

Carisi stabbed a meatball and let out a low grumble.

The fact that Kevin Mulrooney looked so much like Rafael Barba save for a few superficial differences bothered him more — for the moment — than the nature of Mulrooney’s criminal history.

Before dessert, Carisi put on his jacket and joined Teresa, Bella, and Tommy on the porch for a smoke. He didn’t smoke, but was willing to endure the outdoor cloud for the sake of figuring out how to extract Kevin Mulrooney from their family. “I’m glad this family’s forgiven me my past mistakes, more than my own folks have,” Tommy said, “but addiction is a disease. Cutting off somebody’s balls after you shoot them at close range is not a disease.”

“Here here,” Bella said, raising an imaginary glass.

“You guys don’t think somebody can change?” Teresa asked.

Bella was incredulous. “From _that_?”

“Okay, look, Bella and Tommy, I’ve got a question for both of you,” Carisi said. “Who does Mulrooney look like?”

They shrugged, looked at each other, and shrugged again.

“You don’t see it at all?”

“No,” Bella said, confused.

“Rafael Barba?”

Bella laughed to herself.

“I could see it, maybe,” Tommy offered. “If you squint, yeah, there’s sort of a resemblance.”

“I can see it without squinting,” Carisi told them.

“Sonny,” Bella said, walking over to embrace him, “you’ve had a rough couple of months, kiddo.”

The front door squeaked open, and Mulrooney himself emerged, his shoulders stiff, hands trembling, clearly nervous. “Hi,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Hi,” they all said loudly, in chorus.

Mulrooney flinched.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’ve got to do better than that,” Bella complained.

“What else can I —”

“Hey, Kevin,” Carisi said, circling the former ADA, “doesn’t it bother you that Gina’s been engaged six times before?”

“Who am I to criticize, right?” he said an awkward laugh in his throat.

“Six times,” Carisi repeated.

“Are you trying to scare me off?” 

“Maybe.”

“You should talk to your sister about the pressure she felt to get married growing up, about how your parents and aunts and uncles can’t sleep until everyone is married. Ask her how many of those engagements were mistakes. She’ll tell you.”

The Carisi siblings looked at each other, then back at Mulrooney. “Ask her what happened with Lou,” he continued. “Ask her about why all she wanted since she was a little girl was to get married. I promise you, I love her.”

“I’ll grant you that, buddy, I will,” Tommy said, “but that doesn’t change that you killed a guy, premeditated and all, and then —”

“Gina and I understand each other,” was all Mulrooney could offer.

“Yeah,” Bella said, stretching out the single syllable, “let us sleep on it. We’ll decide in a couple weeks whether we’re going to let you into this family.”

Carisi caught a genuine sadness in Mulrooney’s eyes, and had to remind himself not to feel too much sympathy, given the nature of his crimes.

“Gina and I are going home,” Mulrooney said, shuffling back towards the door. “But, um, all of you, talk to your sister before you try to chase me away. Don’t treat her like a joke about a lady who’s been engaged seven times.”

“Goddamnit,” Bella said when Mulrooney was back inside, “he actually fucking loves her and understands her, maybe better than we do.”

“Not buying it,” Carisi said. “Now, listen —”

“He doesn’t look that much like Barba.”

“Will you please get over yourself?” Teresa complained.

Carisi looked down at his feet. “Regardless, all of us, we’ve got to keep an eye on Mulrooney, regardless of how much we think he “understands” Gina.”

“I don’t know,” Bella said, “he made a pretty good argument for himself just now.”

“He’s a lawyer. Lawyers make pretty good arguments for themselves no matter what.”


	5. Chapter 5

Carisi wasn’t sure why he told the attractive, late 40-ish defense attorney who bought him a beer at Forlini’s that he was an ADA.

He hedged a lot on details when strangers flirted with him, but he never outright lied, at least not before tonight, when Andy-the-Rodrigo-and-Gardner-junior-partner-with-ivy-growing-out-of-his-ears told him that he was in New York on behalf of a client. Andy-the-junior-partner asked Carisi if he worked for the courts, and he replied that he was an ADA with the fraud division.

If you want to lie about your job, and you want to hide that lie in plain sight, you say you prosecute fraud.

By midnight, Andy-the-junior-partner(-with-thick-thighs-and-a-wicked-grin) was groaning _Sonny_ in his king-sized hotel bed, stammering the detective’s first name over and over even though Carisi had already come more than half an hour ago, while they’d made out against the wall. “No, no,” Andy-the-junior-partner had said reassuringly, “it’s hot. It’s hot how excited you are.”

Carisi felt a twinge of regret about his lie.

He couldn’t believe this man who could have picked up anybody he wanted to pick up at the bar was so turned on, so enthusiastic about him, a relatively-inexperienced (for someone who was almost 40), forever self-doubting probably-bisexual man who thought mostly in hyphenated identities when he was nervous, who’d gotten himself entirely too worked up far too early.

Andy-the-junior-partner rose slowly out of bed. “You want to take a shower?” he asked, a gorgeous smirk on his face again.

Carisi licked his lower lip. “You’re not going to want to take a shower with me when I tell you I’m not an ADA.”

“You’re a cop,” he said. “I figured as much from your badge.”

Carisi felt himself blush from the top of his forehead all the way down to the middle of his chest. “I’m a detective first-grade with the Special Victims Unit, and I’m a moron.”

The other man laughed. “Andy Carvalho, attorney at law, also a first-grade moron.”

Carisi stood up and followed Carvalho to the bathroom. “And why is that?” he asked, snaking his arms around Carvalho’s torso. 

“Can I tell you after I kiss you one more time?”

Carisi obliged, and Carvalho hummed into his mouth.

“Well?” Carisi asked.

“Scratch that. How about I wait to tell you why I’m a moron until after I’ve sucked you off in the shower?”

“I’m completely on board, but I’m gonna assume —”

“No, no, no, no,” Carvalho said, practically begging, pouting just a little, “Sonny. Please don’t assume.”

He seemed to enjoy saying _Sonny_. A lot.

Carisi decided that it would be acceptable to wait until after their shower for Carvalho to disclose exactly where his conflict of interest lied. Of course, this decision was made with his dick much more than his head or his heart — well, maybe a little, in the moment, a little too much with his heart.

“So,” Carvalho said, watching Carisi intently as the detective sat in the swivel chair next to the desk and put on his socks, “you work for Manhattan SVU. I’m currently working on undermining a statement your boss gave to homicide.”

Carisi took a moment to connect the dots. “Attempted murder of Rafael Barba?”

Carvalho nodded. “It shouldn’t be all that much of a conflict of interest if you —”

Carisi swallowed hard, which made Carvalho trail off. 

“I’m sorry, Sonny,” he continued. “I mean, I get it, she’s your boss. I’d never try to get information out of you, certainly not like this. I’m an obnoxious attorney to go up against, I fight hard, but I respect interpersonal ethics.”

“And what you really want to add to the end of that sentence is _unlike some people_.”

“Hey,” Carvalho said as Carisi crossed the room to retrieve his pants, which he’d left on the chair in the opposite corner of the room, “you should stay.”

Carisi pressed his hand into the back of the chair. “You mentioned Harvard before.”

“We were friends for a long time. He changed in the last year, in the last few months, in fact. Too much.” 

“Yeah, I get that. I see it too, but however much he let you down, the charge against Householder — your client — was real close to being murder one.”

Carvalho sat on the bed, resting his back against the headboard. “You understand I can’t talk about this.”

“Yeah, obviously.”

“But you don’t have to go, Sonny.”

“Don’t I, though?”

“I’m here through Tuesday, then I go back to Albany until Householder’s trial begins.”

“You’re not gonna plead him out?” Carisi asked, approaching the bed.

“He’s entirely innocent.”

“I thought defense attorneys never believed that about their clients.”

“I’m talking to you in my underwear. When I say he’s entirely innocent, you can trust me that I believe he’s entirely innocent.”

Carisi tentatively claimed a side of the bed. Carvalho reached over and ran a hand through his hair, then kissed his lips. “Until Tuesday,” Carvalho mumbled against Carisi’s mouth, “you’re a fraud ADA and neither of us has heard of Aaron Householder or Rafael Barba outside of the New York City papers.”

“I thought you were ethical.”

“I am,” Carvalho insisted.

“Compared to Rafael, we’re all the pinnacle of ethics, aren’t we?”

“Something like that,” Carvalho said, flipping over to turn off the lamp, then wrapping a heavy, comforting arm around Carisi, who’d also turned to face the other way. “What time do you have to be at work?”

“Eight. Alarm is set on my phone.”

“Good,” Carvalho said, and Carisi felt the man smile against his neck, “we can talk in the morning about how you should go to law school.”

“Too late.”

“You’re still young. You’re, what, 32, 33?”

“I’m flattered, but 38, and with a JD from Fordham.”

“You did that while working as a detective?” Carvalho asked, sounding surprisingly impressed.

“Took me five years, but, yeah.”

“You passed the Bar?”

“Yep.”

“First try?”

“I don’t need your praise,” Carisi said, a touch of laughter in his throat.

“You finished a JD and passed the Bar on the first try, while working as a detective in one of the toughest units in NYPD.”

Carisi rolled over, remaining inside Carvalho’s embrace. This man was charming, and Carisi suddenly wasn’t sure whether he could trust him. “I’m a fraud ADA, remember?”

“Sure.” Carvalho kissed him. “Fraud. You coming back tomorrow? I’ll buy you dinner.” He searched Carisi’s face. “We can go to a restaurant, or order room service here. Up to you.”

“As long as you’re not using me to get to my boss.”

“I’m not, I told you. I promise you, my life is merely a series of bad coincidences.”

“I get that,” Carisi said.

“Not that this was bad in any way. This was very, very good. And really, I hope you get the credit you deserve for that JD.”

“Oh, yeah, don’t worry about it,” Carisi said sarcastically, “nobody ever tells me I spread myself too thin or anything.”

_Nobody ever tries to tell me the only reason I’m stressed out, not sleeping, is that I spread myself out too thin, ignoring how close I came to getting shot in the head last year,_ he thought as he closed his eyes and took a chance by leaning further into Carvalho’s embrace. _I’m a detective with an outer-borough accent, for God’s sake, why would a little gun pointed at my head, already a year in the past, still affect me?_

_That was a year ago, Sonny,_ Teresa had said, _how could you let something from a year ago still affect you so bad?_

“It’s all right, Sonny the Fraud ADA,” he heard Carvalho whisper as he drifted off to sleep.

—

“Hear me out,” Barba said, bunching up yesterday’s jeans and tossing them in Benson’s hamper, “Andy may have a point.”

“Oh?” Benson said. “You really want the man who willingly confessed to shooting you, who I saw with the gun an inch away from his hand as if he’d just dropped it, who said, of his own volition, that he wanted to kill you and wished you were dead, back out on the street?”

She let out an exasperated puff of air and left for the bathroom, returning in black leggings and a three-quarter-sleeve soft gray T-shirt. Barba turned around to look at her.

“I took the day off,” she explained.

“You?”

“I promised you a day in bed. Lucy’s taking Noah to the park after school. They won’t be home until 4. Eight hours is the best I can do.”

Barba closed the space between them and kissed Benson’s lips, lingering there. Eight hours is more than I ever thought I’d have.”

“Which is why you shouldn’t want Aaron Householder back out on the street.”

“Liv,” he said, cradling her face in his hands. “I love you. I will spend the rest of my life atoning for the ways I’ve done you wrong. But acting out of fear rather than facts and legal ethics and human rights is not what you and I do.”

“This is different,” Benson insisted.

“It’s not.”

“I saw him with the gum an inch away from his open hand. There’s no other explanation.”

“Then why is a junior partner at a Top 50 firm trying to undermine your account?”

“Because he’s mad at you.”

“Andy sometimes plays his cards too close to the heart —”

“You mean like the bullet that almost killed you?”

“But he’s fiercely ethical, and if he’s genuinely refusing a plea deal, there’s a reason for it. When defense attorneys know their clients are guilty, they work towards a plea. Why is Andy after you, Liv?”

“I can’t tell you,” she said, shaking her head. “They’ll call you as a witness.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Barba said, a teasing smirk suddenly forming at the corner of his mouth,, “if they compel my testimony, we’ll get married.”

That prompted a real laugh from Benson. “A lot of bets would have to be settled.”

With his arms around her waist, Barba stepped closer until they were pressed flush against each other. “If we’re going to spend eight hours in bed, we’d better start now.”

“You have the all clear from the cardiologist and surgeon?”

“Nice way to set the mood,” he said, swaying his hips, not letting go of her as they hobbled towards the bed, arms wound around each other.

“Well?”

“Yes. Of course. I mean, it wouldn’t be the worst way to go —”

“Shut up,” she said, smacking his ass.

Barba sputtered in amusement.

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” Benson admitted.

She palmed him through his boxers and he let out an _oh_ , before kissing her earlobe and whispering, “You feel how hard I am for you?”

“Rafa, honey,” she said, backing him up towards the bed, “I’ve felt how hard you are for me every morning this week, when I’ve woken up with you clinging to me like a 98.6-degree panda.”

Barba raised one eyebrow, and Benson smiled. Barba laid back on the bed.

“What?” she asked.

“My number one fantasy. To make Olivia Benson smile.”

“Yeah?” She straddled him and looked into his eyes, which were flaring with desire, amusement, and a little bit of what might have been relief that he was still alive. “What other fantasies do you have?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he said, licking his lips and canting his hips up towards her.

—

By 2 o’clock in the afternoon, they’d gone two rounds apiece of sex, snacks, and naps. Idly naked, they lay next to each other, Barba running his fingertips across Benson’s hipbone.

“You know if I could,” he said, and she realized that his fingers were tracing the outlines of her scars.

“I know, sweetheart, but let’s not talk about that.”

He buried his head between her neck and collarbone. “Can we talk about what you saw the day I was shot?”

“You really want to talk about the day you were shot _now_?”

“I don’t remember it. The surgeon and Dr. Lindstrom both say I probably never will.”

“You went to Dr. Lindstrom,” she said, pleasantly surprised.

He moved his head downward to kiss her breasts. “Tell me,” he said, “please. It’s bothering you. The only thing that should keep you up at night is me clinging to you like a 98.6-degree panda.”

“Mm. You’re a good panda,” she said, petting his hair.

He lifted his head to look directly into her eyes. “I promise you, if they compel my testimony, we’ll get married.”

“I don’t want to —” She stopped herself and swatted at his sweat-dappled chest hair. “You know what I mean. We’ve been through so much that we’re forgetting this is the first time we’ve commiserated with each other while we’re naked.”

“Seriously,” he said, “if there’s any doubt in your mind —”

“Rafa, I don’t want to lose you.”

“See, this, _this_ must be why I’m having the nightmares. I see in your face, in a lot of people’s faces, how close I came. But after all I’ve been through, and after the stupid choices I made that I will never forgive myself for, I’d be wrong not to push for justice.” He clutched her hand and drew it to his heart. “Liv, you won’t lose me, I promise.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“I can pretend I have control. I can promise I’ll never walk away. I can promise that when the bastards grind me down, I’ll run towards you, not away from you.”

“Okay. Now, you know just as well as I do that I am not a reliable witness. I was scared, and I was concentrating on keeping pressure on your wound.”

“It’s all right,” Barba said, kissing her lips and then each of her eyelids. “Tell me anyway.”

“The weapon was an inch in front of him and his hand was open, his arm stretched out, I definitely registered that as the weapon falling out of his hand. The officers must have tackled him to the ground so they didn’t have to fire, because of the crowds of onlookers and reporters at the bottom of the steps. But — and again, this could be a misplaced memory — I keep remembering Householder’s hands as clean, which wouldn’t be consistent with him firing two shots.”

“Also consistent with the fact that CSU found no gunpowder, no residue on his hands.”

“How do you know that?”

“I have my sources.”

“Please don’t investigate your own attack,” Benson warned. “Trust me. I’ve been there.”

“I wanted to know why Andy Carvalho was nosing around. Part of me wanted to make sure that my ethical breach hadn’t scrambled his ethics. I suppose it only made them stronger.”

“Rafa,” she said, her hand still on his chest, “I want you to be safe.”

“What would you do if this was a case you were working on and a witness recalled the same thing you did?”

“I would want her to come forward.”

“Because —”

“Justice, obviously.”

“So …?”

“So I’m still worried about you.”

He squeezed her hand. “I could remind you that I was foolishly planning to say goodbye to you and skip town after my trial.”

“I’d still have worried about you. I’d probably have been wrong, and stupid, and I’m sure Fin, maybe Rollins and Carisi too, would have asked me what I was doing worrying about an asshole who broke my heart, but … you know how it is.”

“I know.”

“We’ve got two more hours,” she commented.

“I’m going to need more snacks first.”

“I’m not enough snack for you?” she teased, swinging a leg over him.

“You’re always enough snack for me,” he said, “and wait’ll you see what I can do when I’ve had more than a month to recover from a gunshot wound.”

Benson fanned herself with her hand while Barba got out of bed.

“Don’t take anything too crumbly,” she warned.

“We’re washing the sheets anyway.”

“Potato chips and cookies stay in the mattress forever.”

“I love you,” he called from the living room. 

“Put some pants on, Barba,” she shouted back.

—

“Kevin,” Gina said, a hint of warning in her voice as he brushed his nose and lips against her neck, gently tickling her skin. They were huddled together in a semicircular booth in a bar in Bay Ridge, listening to a set by the six-piece band that Gina wanted to hire for their wedding. Mulrooney had taken the band’s ten minute break as an opportunity to canoodle with his future wife.

“Hmm, how about we get married in Atlantic City and screw around in a limo on the way home?” he said into her ear, placing one kiss on her earlobe, another under her chin. “What do you say?”

She smacked his chest and he flashed her a shit-eating grin.

“I know I got my big blowout wedding I always wanted with Louie,” she said, “but —”

“I’ll give you a big blowout, baby,” he said, then immediately cringed in reaction to his own comment.

Gina laughed.

“That did not land well,” Mulrooney sputtered.

“What I was trying to say was, now I want a big blowout wedding with a man who treats me right, who I actually love.”

“Aww,” Mulrooney said, lifting Gina’s hand to kiss the inside of her wrist, “I don’t deserve you.”

“Stop that. I told you, when the demons show up to take you to hell in 50 years —”

“When I’m 95 years old.”

“Yeah, me and the great-grandkids will fight ‘em off.”

“Great-grandkids,” Mulrooney echoed, clearing his throat.

“So, what’s going on? You got any family coming to this wedding, or what?”

“No.”

“It’s going to look really weird at the church when —”

“I didn’t think we were getting married in church. How’s that going to work?”

“Oh, this wedding’s happening at a church, babe. Louie and I petitioned for an annulment. He wants to marry the 21-year-old he’s with in the church too — we’ll see how long that lasts — but we’re getting that annulment. Sonny’s still got contacts from those couple of years he wanted to be a priest way back when.”

“Sonny doesn’t like me.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Gina said, not contradicting her fiancé’s claim. “It’s happening. But, honey, we’ve got to at least invite your dad. Have you talked to him yet? I want to meet him. And what about your cousins in Ireland?”

“My dad and I have only spoken once since I’ve been out of prison, and my mother’s family — rightly — sees me as a black sheep. I’ve, uh, there’s something else you don’t know and probably don’t need to know.”

Gina caressed his cheek and kissed the tip of his nose. “You can tell me anything.”

Mulrooney leaned in to kiss her, letting his tongue explore her mouth as he mulled over whether to continue.

“How about,” Gina said, her lips now directly on his ear, “when we get back to my place, before we get upstairs, we make out in the car in the parking garage for a while?”

Mulrooney’s mouth fell open, his eyelids heavy. 

“Yeah?” she prompted.

“Oh, I do _not_ deserve you, sweetheart.”

“So, tell me.”

Mulrooney blew a raspberry with his lips, then gulped his white wine. “Long-buried family secret. Harry Mulrooney isn’t my biological father. My biological father was supposedly the most charming man in the world, the most charming _married_ man in the world, who promised my mother over and over again that he’d leave his wife for her. I’m sure the guy was not nearly as charming as my mother and aunts and uncles all claimed her was. In any case, she got pregnant. She wasn’t an American citizen yet and life would have been much harder for her as a single mother back then, both here and in Galway, so some of her friends convinced my dad to step up to the plate.”

“He’s always been your father, though.”

“There’s a lot of — resentment — there.” Mulrooney drank again, practically burying his face in the glass. “During her marriage to my father, which was most of her adult life until she passed, she was really in love with this other man, my biological father.”

“You don’t know that.”

“My aunt told me all about it when we’d go to her beach house in Galway over the summer, whether or not I wanted to hear it, from the time I was eight years old.”

“My poor Kevin,” Gina said, a pout forming on her lips.

“When I was younger, I believed that I had a father somewhere who was more like me. Family romance.” He let out a breathy _huh_ and put an arm around Gina. “Now that I’m older and a creep with a criminal history — that’s factual, do not try to tell me otherwise — I’ve begun to realize that my biological father was probably a creep who snowed over my mother’s whole family.”

“You ever try to find him?”

“I thought about getting one of those family tree DNA kits, but I”m a convicted felon, so I’m not offering up my DNA for fun.”

“I get that.”

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll call my dad, my dad who raised me regardless of what he might think of me now, tomorrow morning. We’ll call him together. Whatever he says, I have you by my side.”

“Sounds good,” Gina said, resting a hand on his thigh. “You like the band?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Let’s forget the second half of the set and go back to my car and have some fun.”

“Yes,” Mulrooney said, grabbing her hand and leading her out of the booth.


	6. Chapter 6

Gina Carisi and Kevin Mulrooney were back in Bay Ridge on Saturday night, this time at a dance club frequented by a bridge-and-tunnel 30s-and-40s crowd who longed for their early twenties, but had maybe — if you asked some people — peaked around sixth grade. It was midnight. Freestyle music blared through the speakers. Everyone was exhausted; they’d all arrived that way an hour or two earlier.

Out of nowhere, the music screeched to a halt and all the lights in the club turned on.

Three masked men, maybe four, Gina couldn’t remember, had guns trained on the clubgoers. They must have been professional, she’d tell the cops later. Professional something-or-others.

The doors were locked with metal bars that the men had brought with them. 

They wanted money, one of them said, almost reassuringly. They promised no one would get hurt if the club owner emptied the safe and no one called the police for half an hour after they left.

They promised.

The promises of three of four masked men who burst into a club at midnight and bolted the doors shut weren’t worth much. 

On their way out, one man carried a bag filled with the contents of the club’s safe. Another turned around and shot Mulrooney through the heart.

Gina screamed.

The men left. They didn’t bother to remind the clubgoers to wait half an hour before calling the police.

Mulrooney gasped loudly for air, and then he was gone.

Gina saw how the homicide detectives looked at her when she recounted what had happened. Something wasn’t right about Mulrooney being killed in the course of a robbery. The men had said they wouldn’t hurt anybody as long as no one moved or called the police until they were long gone. Mulrooney hadn’t moved a muscle, and yet, as they were leaving, one man stopped in his tracks, turned around, and shot him point blank.

She replayed it again and again in her mind, trying to make sense of what had happened to the first man she’d genuinely been in love with.

“Gina,” one of the detectives said, “we’re going to need you to come down to the precinct with us.”

“Oh my God,” she said, suppressing a dry heave at the back of her throat, “the robbery was just to throw everybody off, wasn’t it?”

“We’d like you to come down to the precinct,” the detective repeated.

“My stupid ex-husband Louie, he was hiding a lot of money from me, the divorce lawyer said so. Oh, God,” she said, watching the body bag being carried away, “Kevin! He’s the first guy I ever really loved, like, really, really loved, and — I can’t — what would Louie want to kill my future husband for? What does he get out of — this isn’t real, right? Oh my God.” She kept repeating _Oh my God, oh my God_ to herself while a detective, steadying her arm, led her to the squad car. “I’ve got to call my brother,” she said as she ducked inside. “Dominick Carisi Jr., he’s a detective with Manhattan SVU.” She fished through her purse for her phone and dialed her brother’s number.

—

Carisi was in bed with Carvalho, starting a second round for the night when he heard his cell phone’s familiar melody echoing from the bedside table. “Is that the fraud department?” Carvalho asked.

“Yeah, probably,” Carisi said sheepishly. They’d agreed to pretend that Carisi was a fraud ADA and Carvalho was in town on business that had nothing whatsoever to do with Rafael Barba until Carvalho returned to Albany on Tuesday morning.

Carisi’s heart jumped into his throat when he saw Gina’s name on the screen.

“What’s wrong?” he said immediately.

He heard a loud whimper on the other end and leapt up out of bed.

“Where are you?”

“At the police station in Bay Ridge. These guys with guns and masks burst into the club we were at, we thought they were robbing the place and —” The pitch of her voice rose higher and higher as she spoke. “They were leaving with money, said no one was going to get hurt, but then one of them turned around and shot Kevin.”

“Stay where you are, tell the detectives you want to wait for me —”

“That’s what I did. I mighta sputtered out something about Louie, but I know, it must have been — they were — Kevin didn’t make it, Sonny,” she sobbed.

“Hold tight. I’ll be there in half an hour. I love you.”

Carvalho’s eyes were dark with concern as Carisi scrambled to put his clothes on. “My sister’s fiancé was killed,” he explained. “From what she said, it sounds like a hit job badly disguised as a robbery. I’ve got to make sure they’re giving her room to grieve, and not throwing her to whatever wolves went after Kevin.”

“Of course,” Carvalho said, standing and pulling on a pair of pajama pants. “Does she need a —”

“A defense attorney? I hope not.”

“Call me if they’re questioning her. I probably shouldn’t handle it myself, but I can get Rita Calhoun down there for her.”

“I’m more worried about how much she knows about who might have wanted Kevin dead. He did eight years for murder, not sure how he got away with that sentence for what was definitely premeditated, but he was an ADA who murdered a defendant who’d been found not guilty. This guy’s not an upstanding —”

“Kevin is Kevin _Mulrooney_?”

“I assume he’s in the Bad Lawyer Hall of Fame.”

“No,” Carvalho said, moving closer, looking down into Carisi’s eyes. “Hypothetical scenario: Mulrooney was hypothetically a longshot source for reasonable doubt in a case I’m hypothetically working.”

Carisi’s eyes grew wide. “Answer me one thing, and then I’m going to go be with Gina and we never have to speak of this again: do you see it too?”

He could tell from the way Carvalho chewed the inside of his cheek that he knew exactly what — who — “it” referred to.

Carvalho nodded slowly.

“I thought I was the only one,” Carisi said.

“I can’t talk about this, but if I could, I’d tell you your sister probably isn’t in danger, and probably never was.”

“I have to go be with her.”

Carvalho leaned in and kissed Carisi. “Since we probably won’t see each other again before I go back to Albany, can I call you next time I’m in town?”

“Yeah,” Carisi said. “We can do that.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“I will. You too.”

“I’m serious, Sonny. Take good care of yourself.”

As he drove over the Williamsburg Bridge at two o’clock in the morning, Carisi chided himself for entertaining the possibility that he was falling for the attorney he’d only spent three nights with.

Besides, with Mulrooney in Carvalho’s sights — Mulrooney, a man who bore a strong resemblance to Barba, was a potential source of reasonable doubt in Carvalho’s defense of Aaron Householder — the conflicts of interest were through the roof.

At the precinct, Gina fell into her brother’s arms, the full effects of what had happened a little over two hours ago hitting her hard. “They’re gonna talk to Louie,” she said between sobs, “but I overheard somebody saying something about how Louie’s motive makes no sense.”

“Don’t worry about that right now.”

“It’s not fair. Kevin knew he was going to hell, he just wanted to have a little bit of good, a little bit of real happiness, while he had the chance.” She lifted her head and flagged down an officer who was passing by. “Did they call his father? Harry Mulrooney in New Dorp, Staten Island. Call his dad, all right?”

The officer responded with a sympathetic “I will.”

“Sonny,” Gina said, wrapping both of her arms around one of his, “what am I gonna do?”

“Let’s go sit down,” Carisi suggested.

“No.” Gina shook her head. “I can’t. This isn’t real.”

“Do you know something? Was Kevin in trouble?”

“No. He changed, he’s not the same man who — you know, he really was guilty, that Burnham guy, his second wife last year finally admitted that he tried to kill her too, and that she came to believe he really did kill his first wife — Kevin’s not the same man he was ten years ago. He wasn’t in trouble.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Carisi said, keeping his voice low.

“You just did,” she answered, a childhood joke emerging through her tears.

“What did Kevin —”

“They’ve got to look at Louie. I know they probably think he’s too stupid to pull something like this off, but like you always said, some really bad people hide behind what we all think is stupidity. They’ve got to look at him.”

“They will. What did Kevin tell you about his parents?”

“His mom passed, like, 15 years ago and his dad hasn’t spoken to him for a long time. They weren’t on real good terms even before he went to jail.” She wrinkled her forehead. “Why are you asking me this?”

“It’s what the detectives will be asking you for the next few days.”

“But it’s weird, because he just told me about his family last night — Friday night, I mean — but it’s not — he’s known since he was a kid.”

Carisi rubbed his eyes. “What?” Gina prompted. “It’s nothing criminal. It’s just that his dad wasn’t his biological father. Sounded to me like an open secret with their family. For a long time, too.”

“Yeah,” Carisi said, quickly shaking his head, “lots more families in that situation than you’d think. Probably nothing.”

“That means you think it’s something.”

“Did I say that?”

“I know you. You say “probably nothing,” it means you’re worried. What am I gonna do, Sonny? What am I gonna tell Ma?”

“You’re worried Ma’ll be mad at you because your fiancé was killed?” he said, turning to face her. “You know what, I could see that.”

“She’ll say _how could you let this happen?_.”

“Come on. I’ll take you home.”

“I want to wait for Kevin’s dad,” she said. “I want to tell him I loved Kevin, and whatever wrong he did, he didn’t deserve to go this way.”

—

Barba was shaken up at the news that former ADA Kevin Mulrooney had been shot in a club robbery that may not have been a robbery after all. When Benson asked him why, he told her he’d remembered the water cooler gossip at the Brooklyn DA’s office back then, how the thought that an ADA could sink so low after losing a case kept them all up at night. He said he related too much to the downfall of a dedicated ADA.

But later, when it was 2AM and the thought of Kevin Mulrooney really was keeping him up at night, he told Benson about Mulrooney’s role in his dreams about the Island of Discarded ADAs. “Coincidence,” she said.

“I know. And I saw myself in him, in the headlines that called me the Baby Killer ADA. The Post called him the Cross-Dressing Vigilante and was focused on the wrong part of the story. I should probably spend a night at home soon.”

“That’s what Dr. Lindstrom said?”

“He said as long as you’re open to it, I can wait a few more weeks, since I’m not cleared to go back to work for another six. But I have to push myself.”

“Sweetheart, you were _shot_ five weeks ago. Please don’t push yourself.”

“I spoke to McCoy on Friday, asked him to reassign me to a different division. He wants to put me on Hate Crimes.”

Benson smiled. “You know, if I’m promoted to captain —”

“Hate Crimes will be under your purview too. McCoy feels that’s not ethically iffy at all, so I’m going with it.”

Benson laughed. “McCoy’s not one to talk about ethical iffyness.”

“Maybe you should run it by Dodds, just in case.”

Benson wrapped her arms around Barba. “You’ll be okay. You and I are going to discard all of this awfulness somehow and keep moving forward. It’ll take time, but we’ll make it through.”

He kissed her forehead. “Together,” he promised.

—

Melinda Warner was scrambling around the ME’s office, moving from station to station, multitasking as always. At 8 o’clock on Monday morning, it was just her and Benson.

“I have records from Aaron Householder’s orthopedist, including X-rays and his surgical history. I can’t show any of it to you since it’s not your case,” Warner said. “Liv, I called you here because I know the prosecution is counting on your testimony, but Householder could not possibly have fired a gun.”

“Even if —”

“However small the gun was, however determined Householder was, he could not have fired a gun given the nature of the surgeries he had on his right hand and the conditions resulting from them. There is nothing else I can legally share with you, but you have to trust me on this.”

“Then why is he still insisting that he shot Rafael?”

“That’s your job,” Warner said. “Or, rather, that’s homicide’s job.”

By 3 that afternoon, Benson was in Captain Dodds’ office at 1PP with a union rep, Lieutenant Kevin Bernard, homicide prosecutor Casey Novak (who’d thankfully been readmitted to the Bar after a review decided that other prosecutors — Barba included — had merely been suspended for similar offenses), and Andy Carvalho, who was heading back to Albany the next morning.

“I didn’t revise my statement earlier because I honestly can’t be sure of what I saw,” Benson told them. “I’ve worked with witnesses many times before, and I know how bad memory can be, even in non-traumatic situations.”

“Mr. Carvalho and I will both question you on the stand,” Novak said, “and the jury will decide for themselves.”

“Or,” Carvalho said, “this will give Ms. Novak good reason to drop the charges. I hear your ME agrees with our expert’s findings regarding Mr. Householder’s hand.”

“We have three non-coerced confessions.”

“And I’m in the process of getting Householder interviewed and evaluated by a psychiatrist. We have access to the top experts at Rodrigo and Gardner, and clearly I’m more committed to protecting Householder from his own bad decisions than any of you are.”

“We’ll call Elizabeth Olivet,” Novak said.

“Let Lieutenant Benson go ahead with her revised statement, please.”

Benson took a deep breath and told them that she’d definitely seen the gun an inch from Householder’s open hand, and had definitely registered that sight as indicating that Householder dropped the gun when an officer tackled him from behind. But when he briefly flipped up the palms of his hands — she recalled this more clearly now that she wasn’t trying to push the albeit-wobbly memory aside — his palms were entirely clean.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Carvalho said. “Ms. Novak and I need to talk.”

—

Amidst the impossible Hunter case and Alex Cabot’s unexpected return later that week, Benson was surprised to learn that Aaron Householder was still maintaining his guilt, still remanded without bail at Rikers, still insisting to Carvalho that he wanted a lesser sentence, not complete exoneration.

On Thursday evening, Benson invited her senior squad over for wine, coffee, and a small dose of sanity in the middle of yet another difficult case. She’d wanted Noah to have a family, and had gone about that wrong by trusting Sheila Porter in spite of a thousand red flags waving in her face, so now, she tried to establish a sense of family for him by inviting the people he knew as Aunt Amanda and Uncles Fin and Sonny over every few weeks.

Rollins left first, with Jesse. Fin said good night shortly after Noah went to bed, and Carisi stayed to help load the dishwasher.

When Benson returned from the bathroom and approached Carisi to see if he needed assistance, she caught him swiping what looked like a white cotton swab around the rim of one of the coffee cups, placing the swab in a bag, and pocketing it, all in less than a single second.

“What the hell did you just do?” Benson asked — practically shouted — as she hurried towards Carisi, who was standing with his back to the sink.

Carisi feigned confusion, or at least he tried to, because all Benson read on his face was fear. Barba rushed in to see what was going on.

“Empty your pockets, Carisi,” Benson demanded.

He did what she asked. She snatched up a sealed plastic baggie containing a cotton swab, exactly what she thought she’d seen moments before.

“Why are you swabbing my family for DNA?” she asked, the words _my family_ rolling off her tongue before she could process their implications.

“I made a mistake.”

“You’re only saying that because you were caught. Whose cup was that?”

Carisi swallowed hard.

“I’m your commanding officer. After the Hunter case is wrapped, you’re off my squad. You’d better call your union rep, because I might decide to go further when I see Dodds tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Carisi said, shoving his hands in his pockets, “this was way out of line.”

“I agree.”

“Whose cup was that?” she asked for the second time, now through gritted teeth. 

Carisi scratched at his hairline. “Barba’s,” he admitted.

“Why?” she said, her voice breaking on the one-syllable question. She’d been able to count on Carisi for the last few years, and so she was horrified at yet another heel turn from someone whom she’d thought of as consistently trustworthy. 

“I’ll put in for a transfer tomorrow, Lieutenant.”

“I want you in my office tomorrow at 8 with an explanation, or your badge is on the line.”

“My, uh, sister’s fiancé’s funeral is tomorrow.”

“Monday, then. And you’ll put in for that transfer immediately after we meet.”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

Carisi walked out with his head down.

Benson and Barba looked at each other and shrugged.

“There’s no way I misjudged Carisi that badly,” she said. “I’ve made some very bad judgments on at least five people in my life, extraordinarily bad judgments, but Carisi? Not Carisi.”

“I agree,” Barba said, gently closing the dishwasher. “Last time I saw him, just after I got out of the hospital, he told me he’d once looked up to me as a mentor, and that I’d let him down, that he’d never have believed I’d interfere in a family’s case the way I did. He said that I made a stupid, destructive decision that went against every legal and ethical principle in the books, and to be honest, I agree with his assessment. But I thought that tonight, he was coming around again.”

“It must be related to Householder trying to kill you, but then he’s interfering in homicide’s case and I really do have a reason to send him to Dodds.”

“What would want with my DNA?” Barba wondered. “There’s no DNA involved in the investigation into Householder, and even if there was, there’s no question about whether mine would be at the crime scene.”

“Would you please stop calling in favors to nose around in your own — oh.” She covered her mouth with her hand, and, returning to the living room, flopped down onto the couch. “Hey, Rafa, come sit for a second.”

He sat with her and tilted his head.

“What Carisi just did may not have anything to do with the investigation at all. I hope this is my detective brain connecting unconnected things, because if I’m right, Carisi crossed a very personal line with you.”

“I don’t understand.”

Benson reached out a hand and placed it on Barba’s thigh. “Did you know that Gina Carisi was engaged to Kevin Mulrooney and she was right there next to him in the club when he was killed?”

“Kevin Mulrooney,” Barba repeated slowly.

“Has anyone ever told you —”

“No,” Barba said, drawing out the word.

“I’m just suggesting one reason —”

“It was a joke with some of my co-workers in Brooklyn back then. But that’s not uncommon, unrelated people who happen to look a little alike. My mother’s Facebook profile photo is Mercedes Ruehl from 1993, and no one knows the difference.”

“Maybe Carisi was trying to protect you,” Benson suggested. “Or maybe I’m being way too generous, as I often am.”

Barba smiled quickly, sarcastically, the corners of his eyes exploding into sunbursts of wrinkles. “I would not put it past my father.”

“They say that everybody has doppelgängers because of the genetic lottery,” Benson said, lifting her hand so she could rub his back, “but you and I both know — you and I, specifically — that if we see someone who looks like us, it’s worth asking a few probing questions.”


	7. Chapter 7

Carisi sat at the top of the cement steps leading to the funeral home’s back door, his legs stretching all the way down to the dark asphalt of the parking lot. Gina sat just below him, leaning against the side of the building that jutted out past the steps. Bella was cross-legged on the top step, smoking a cigarette; Teresa, from the step below, handed Bella’s lighter back to her.

“You’ve got to be strong,” Teresa told Gina, “we all do.”

“Give her some time to grieve, for God’s sake,” Bella said, waving smoke away from her brother’s and Gina’s faces.

Gina looked up at Carisi. “Ma said this is the trouble I got myself into, getting involved with a guy like Kevin. But, you know, she’s wrong, there was good in him. He was so mad about how that man got away with killing his wife. Everybody always says it’s because his career was flushed down the toilet, but it was more than that. He was mad that Burnham got away with killing his wife, and made all this money and was practically a celebrity. Believe me, don’t believe me, I —” She stopped, covering her eyes with her hand.

“Come on, Gee,” Teresa said, “you can’t be like this. What’re you going to do, jump into his grave like a grieving widow?”

“Teresa!” the other two Carisis snapped. 

“I’m just saying, I’ve seen it before, it looks ridiculous, put upon, and I don’t want anybody talking about you.”

“Yeah, Teresa, here I am, haven’t slept in a week, the only guy who ever loved me for me gets shot right in front of my face, probably a hit job so God knows what danger I’m in, so, I’m real worried about what people are going to say about me if I break down at my fiancé’s funeral.”

Carisi closed his eyes. “Don’t worry. You’re most likely safe.”

“I thought you weren’t allowed to be involved in the case.”

“I’m not allowed to investigate.” He let out a loud sigh. “In fact, if I’m not careful, I’ll be off the force soon.”

“What happened?” Bella asked.

“What’d you do this time?” was Teresa’s question.

“I thought this gig with Manhattan SVU was gonna stick,” Gina said. “Pop was saying you wanted to take the sergeant’s exam.”

“I fucked up badly. Toed the line, or kicked the line over, with regards to what happened with Kevin.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Bella said. Then, after a few seconds of silence, “What’s his name?”

Carisi flinched. “Huh?”

“What’s his name, Sonny?”

Gina’s face spread into a smile. “You see this? First smile in six days. Spill.”

“No,” Carisi said.

“What don’t I know here?” Teresa demanded. “You’re gay and you never told me? What’d you keep that from me for?”

“I sleep with men and women,” Carisi said, “but in reality, I rarely sleep with anyone.”

“Wait, wait, I want to know more. Since when —”

“Do you see,” Carisi said, turning to Bella, “how fucking exhausting and not worth it this is?”

Bella nodded slowly.

“You know the jokes Ma and Pop used to make,” Carisi said, “and _you_ , Teresa, when you were younger, and all the aunts and uncles. You know how everybody wants details and definitions, and then more details, more definitions, more explanations. It’s exhausting.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Gina said.

“What,” Teresa snorted, “you’re all of a sudden _enlightened_ , Gina, because you were in love?”

“Teresa,” Carisi warned.

“What?”

“You’re being an asshole.”

Bella silently clapped.

“What’s his name?” Gina asked.

“It’s not serious, and we shouldn’t have been commiserating in the first place.”

“Commiserating,” Gina repeated.

“The big words means he’s in love,” Bella said.

“Am not,” was all Carisi could come up with.

“For real, though,” Gina said, “you all right, Sonny?”

“Yeah, my lieutenant usually comes around in the end. I can’t really talk about it, but on account of this stupid thing I did —”

“For your boyfriend,” Gina teased.

“He’s a lawyer, a good one, and he’d never ask me to do what I did — and not my boyfriend, goddamnit, you got me for a second — I mean, I don’t know him all that well, it was only three days, but he wouldn’t ask me, or anyone, to do what I did. No more about this, okay? It’s a real conflict of interest and I don’t want him to get in trouble.”

Teresa stood up. “You ready?” she asked Gina. “The mass starts in ten minutes.”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Gina said. She stepped over her brother’s legs and linked arms with Teresa.

“Be strong,” Teresa reminded her.

“Fuck off,” Bella said. Then, when Gina and Teresa were back inside: “Ignore Teresa. Be happy.”

“Let’s see what happens with my job first.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Bella tried to assure him.

“I’ve honestly never seen Liv so —”

The door creaked open and Teresa poked her head out. “Hey, Sonny, that ADA who helped out Tommy is here.”

Carisi leapt up.

Inside, he saw Barba standing near a wall at the back of the room, the furthest possible distance from the casket, shrugging into his black suit that fit too loosely because of the weight and muscle mass he’d lost while in the hospital. His gray trenchcoat was slung over one arm.

“Rafael,” he said, keeping his voice low, “step outside with me a minute.”

The two men walked out to the parking lot, passing Bella on her way back inside.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Carisi told him.

“Thought I’d pay my respects to the half-brother I never knew.”

“Nobody’s sure about that yet.”

“Which is why you were trying to test my DNA without my consent. You of all people should know better.”

“Mulrooney might be connected to the man who shot you.”

“To Householder?” Barba asked.

“No, to whoever — look trust me on this —”

“And here I thought you were simply nosing around in private family matters.”

“Trust me. I don’t know the details, but Mulrooney might have known something about who shot you, or his — existence — somehow establishes reasonable doubt for Householder.”

“Seems unlikely that anyone would confuse —” Barba cut himself off, folding his arms as he looked at Carisi through narrowed eyes. “Carisi, how do you know so much about the defense strategy?”

“Information I accidentally came across.”

“Please don’t tell me you’ve been talking to Andy Carvalho.”

“It was an accident, a series of mistakes. He didn’t disclose anything else, he couldn’t, and that’s why I took matters into my own hands. It was a violation of privacy on my part, and mine alone. An error in judgment.”

An error in judgment. Barba knew all about errors in judgment.

“Listen,” Barba said, “there’s still a police detail on me whenever I leave Liv’s apartment.”

“So NYPD knows you’re here?”

“I’m costing them a lot of money for a guy whose attempted murderer has been remanded without bail.”

“So then —”

“Constitutionally, human-rights-wise, Householder should not be remanded. But he confesses at least once a day.”

“All I’m saying is, my sister’s fiancé was a possible angle for reasonable doubt —”

“In Andy Carvalho’s defense of Aaron Householder.”

“Yes.”

Carisi could have sworn he saw a smirk on Barba’s face. When Barba said, “Let me tell you a story about Andy Carvalho,” Carisi realized he was right.

“Andy Carvalho has bad luck. Right out of Harvard, he was hired by this high-end firm in Central Jersey. Turns out half their clientele was old-school mafia. It took Andy about two years to figure this out. By the time he does, he can’t get past the interview stage for another job, he’s in the middle of a divorce, and then he sleeps with the federal attorney trying to take down the head of the “family” his firm represented. In the end, Andy sent a whole lot of hitmen to jail on a pure dumb-luck own goal.”

Carisi shoved his hands into his pockets and tried to steady his anxiously tapping foot.

“Starts at Rodrigo and Gardner, works his way up to associate in three years. Almost marries an attorney who bilked one of Andy’s own clients out of thousands of dollars in fees years back. I only know one other person with that sort of bad luck regarding conflicts of interest.”

“Don’t talk about my boss like that,” Carisi couldn’t help saying.

“I’m calling it bad luck, nothing else. On both their parts. Yours too, I assume. But don’t tell her I said that. Don’t tell Andy I said that either. Let’s go inside.”

“Are you sure?”

“Whatever involvement with Householder or anyone else there might have been, Mulrooney could be my brother. I read about his case last night, and honestly, part of me empathizes. Not with the nature of the crime itself, of course, but how quickly his career was destroyed, with how he _knew_ Burnham killed his first wife and wasn’t proven right until the second wife came forward with the truth only last year.”

“Sounds like mass is starting,” Carisi said.

Maybe if you’d mentored Mulrooney, he wouldn’t have lost it and neither would you, Carisi wanted to say. If you’d mentored _him_ instead.

They sat through Mass, Barba in the last row and Carisi up front near Gina. Afterwards, Carisi returned to Barba at the back of the room.

“I’m not going to the cemetery,” Barba said. “Don’t need to burden NYPD with any more costs.” He looked at his feet. “Don’t tell Andy I disclosed so much of his personal history. My ethics are scrambled these days. I should think before I speak.”

“You should think —”

“Excuse me, excuse me, sir, I’m sorry to interrupt,” an older woman with an Irish accent said as she wedged her way between Barba and Carisi. “Sir, may I ask — may I tell you, you are the spitting image of Rafael Barba.”

Barba tilted his head, his lips parting and forehead wrinkling in confusion. Two other mourners, also apparently in their mid-to-late-70s, approached behind the woman.

“My name’s Jane Sullivan. Kevin’s mum was my sister.” She turned to the mourners behind her. “My sister Molly, and my husband Tim. Are you also Rafael’s son? Oh, you must be his son with his wife, the little boy he said he had at home. Rafael was such a wonderful man, a generous soul.”

Barba gritted his teeth. “You are referring to Rafael Barba, Sr., I take it.”

“I’m sorry. I understand he was unfaithful, but the reason he couldn’t stay with Brigid and Kevin, the reason he wouldn’t, he told Brigid, was that he so adored you and your mother.”

Barba flashed Mulrooney’s aunts and uncle a pained smile.

“I am so glad he knew Rafael’s family after all,” Jane said. “I didn’t think he’d ever sought you folks out.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Barba said, and he turned to leave.

Carisi patted Barba’s back. “Hey, I’m —”

“Go be with your family,” Barba said.

—

“Rafael?” Benson said gently, when she found Barba sitting on her bed just after she’d said goodnight to Noah. He was staring at the wall, his eyes focused on nothing in particular.

She sat next to him and laid an open hand over one of his clenched fists. “Talk to me.”

“I went to Kevin Mulrooney’s funeral today.”

“How could you put yourself in danger like that?”

“I wasn’t in danger.”

“There was a possible link between —”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to be nosing around in the investigation into my shooting.”

“Fair enough,” she said, leaning over so that she was embracing him. “Talk to me. Please.”

His eyes fluttered closed. “In our line of work, we’ve seen, so many times, abusers who show one face to their — to the people they abuse — and another to their friends, or co-workers, or secret second families.”

“Okay. Come here.” She drew him into a full embrace, rubbing circles over his undershirt. “You and Mulrooney have the same father?”

“Mulrooney’s mother, and his mother’s sisters, thought the world of a man who once broke both of my mother’s eye sockets, who’d leave us for weeks at a time and never send us any of the money he was apparently sending to his other family.”

“I’m sorry, Rafa.”

“I have his name,” he said, the words coming out as a single breath.

“And nothing else.”

“I had to get out of there. They were singing his praises.”

“My biological father had a wife and son who thought he had a daughter from a “previous relationship.” They had no idea he was a serial rapist. Like you said, this is common with abusers of all stripes.”

Barba lifted Benson’s hand to his lips and kissed the inside of her wrist. “The reason I hesitated for so long, for so many years, about asking you if you wanted to pursue something romantic, was that you had a son, and I was afraid.”

“And here I thought it was just because you were worried Noah would throw up on your suit.”

“Liv.” He leaned in and kissed her lips. “This is not something I talk about.”

“I love you.”

“I love you so much that when I thought I was dead, when I thought I was stuck on that island forever, all I could think about was how much I’d let down you and Noah, that you were going to have to sit Noah down and explain to him that I was gone, that someone had killed me. All I wanted to do was let you know that I loved you.”

“See,” she said, touching the side of his face, “you are nothing like him.”

—

On Monday evening, Carisi was driving Jules Hunter to a hotel when the passenger side of the squad car was t-boned by a larger vehicle. The driver fled the scene and still had not been located when Rollins and CSU arrived. Jules Hunter was dead. Carisi was covered in blood, some of hers, some of his own. He wished he’d reacted more quickly.

She was dead, and so was the case against her husband, unless CSU found fingerprints or DNA in the car. Nick Hunter would probably get custody of his daughter.

Carisi was sitting in the back of the ambulance, his right temple searing from an abrasion, and all he could do was stare straight ahead as Rollins rubbed his back. When Benson showed up, Rollins filled her in, and Carisi’s voice shook as he told her what he’d seen. She assured him that there was nothing he could have done.

“Hey,” Benson said when Rollins went to talk to CSU, “all is forgiven, okay, Sonny?”

Carisi closed his eyes. “You don’t need to forgive me.”

“Never pull anything like that again, but let’s move forward.”

“Yeah,” he said, rubbing the side of his head.

“Who can I call for you?”

“Nobody.”

“The medic thinks you have a concussion. You’ll need someone to drive you home from the ER and stay with you overnight.”

“My family’s going through enough already with Gina.”

“Andy Carvalho is back in town because Aaron Householder is still confessing several times a day. I don’t know if he’s still here, but we were at a deposition together this morning.”

Carisi slammed a hand into the floor of the ambulance, shuddering when he realized how much blood was on his fingers. “Barba can’t keep his mouth shut, can he? Lieu, I know I shouldn’t still be — at my age — as an SVU detective —”

“Sonny, it’s fine. Barba didn’t —”

“— so goddamn _closeted_ , it’s not fair to a lot of people, I’m doing a big disservice to —”

“I know better than to out someone. I know that for all we have in common, everyone is allowed to have their own story. Barba didn’t say anything. I’m just … a trained detective.”

“It was three nights. We called it quits because of the conflicts of interest, since I’m connected to both Barba and Mulrooney. He doesn’t need to take on having to nurse me through a concussion after traveling back and forth on the Thruway. If they tell me I need someone to drive me home, I’ll call my sister Teresa. She’ll yell at me for getting myself into this, for getting a lady killed, but better her than Bella, or Rollins, who both have a little kid at home.”

After Carisi’s CAT scan said he was free to go home as long as he was accompanied, a text came in from Carvalho: _Just saw you in my news alerts. Tell me you’re ok._

_Concussion and a few stitches_ , Carisi wrote back.

_I was worried. Do you need someone to take you home? Drove down this AM, was going to head back, but can pick you up and help you w/whatever you need._

Carisi had to think for a few seconds about accepting the offer of help, but he didn’t want to have to trouble anyone who would have to drive over the Verrazano Bridge. 

When they got back to Carisi’s apartment, well after midnight, Carvalho hugged him tight.

“I’m fine,” Carisi assured him. “Like my lieutenant said, there was nothing I could have done.”

“Sonny.”

Carisi pressed his face into Carvalho’s shoulder, and then an unexpected flood of tears came, tears that had been backed up behind his eyes ever since the barrel of a gun had been pointed at his head a little over a year ago, the last time someone else’s blood had been on his skin.

He immediately began apologizing, through sobs, to the man he’d known for only two weeks.

“Don’t,” Carvalho said. “You need it sometimes. Believe me, I know.”

Carisi wondered if Carvalho had ever had the chance to let out what he’d bottled up about his unfortunate past employment and relationship choices. Of course, Carvalho wasn’t aware that Carisi knew any of his backstory.

Carisi kissed Carvalho’s lips, letting the kiss linger further than he’d let any kiss linger during their three nights together. 

“You need to rest, okay?” Carvalho said, kissing Carisi’s uninjured temple. 

Carisi nodded.

“I’ll be here,” Carvalho promised.

In the morning, as they lay in bed together, Carisi squinting in pain at the sunlight coming in through the blinds, Carvalho gently massaging the center of Carisi’s forehead, Carvalho shared with Carisi everything that Barba had already told him at the funeral.

He remembered what Gina had told him about how she’d thought she was in love ten or twenty times before she met Kevin, and that she only realized in retrospect that she was falling in love for the first time. In bed that morning, Carisi understood exactly what she’d meant.

—

“So,” Rollins said, taking a seat opposite Benson in the break room, “the Jules Hunter case is no longer ours.”

“Homicide wants to take it away from us?”

“Yes and no.”

Benson stood up and walked over to the coffee machine, staring at it as if it held an answer.

“You want to know why?” Rollins prompted.

“No,” Benson said, “but unfortunately, it’s my job.”

“Fin and I caught our hitman last night. Lucas Corman, 55 years old, longtime pro, in and out of prison for the last thirty years. Guess where else Corman’s fingerprints turned up?”

“If you tell me on the gun Householder says he fired, I’m retiring and moving to Iowa.”

“No.”

“Then where?” Benson asked, pressing her back to the coffee machine and closing her eyes.

“On one of the tables in the club where Kevin Mulrooney was shot. CSU dusted for prints right after the supposed robbery. Corman’s claiming he was there for the music and vodka. Homicide doesn’t think so.”


	8. Chapter 8

Barba returned to the Manhattan DA’s office in May, where he was reassigned to Hate Crimes but was able to remain in his old office, a welcome oasis of familiarity in a newly-confusing, sometimes-frightening world. The bullet that had ripped through his ribcage only three months earlier was now encased in glass on his desk, courtesy of Judge Elana Barth, who kept a similar reminder of her own ordeal, her own survival, in her chambers.

Householder’s trial was underway. It was supposed to start on the first of the month, but had been delayed by three days so Carvalho could convince his client to submit a not guilty plea. Casey Novak was furious. Barba would have been furious too, if he’d been the prosecutor rather than the victim; he didn’t know whether or not Householder had indeed shot him, but he worried that the man would be wrongfully convicted on his behalf.

He worried that he’d set the events of February 7th — all of them — into motion himself.

A month earlier, when Barba was still shuffling between Benson’s apartment and his own (but much preferring hers), when he was desperate to return to work so he didn’t have time to _think_ and _ruminate_ about the shooting he couldn’t remember, a break had come in the investigation into Kevin Mulrooney’s murder. Lucas Corman, the hitman who Nick Hunter had hired to kill his estranged wife, had confessed to killing Mulrooney as well. In exchange for a lesser sentence, Corman also gave up the man who’d hired him to kill Mulrooney.

He’d been hired by Fred Gardner, senior founding partner of Rodrigo and Gardner in upstate New York, the firm that Andy Carvalho worked for.

Gardner had been on the outs with Rodrigo for some time, and Rodrigo was planning to break up the firm for good. Rodrigo told state police and the Attorney General that Gardner had a roster of shady clients back in the 70s, but he’d thought that Gardner had left all of that shadiness behind until recently, when he discovered links between Gardner and several hitmen.

Corman couldn’t speak to motive, because you don’t share your motive with your hitman.

Carvalho gave a deposition in front of the Attorney General, sharing his own story: he’d been hired by Gardner sixteen years ago out of the mafia-linked firm he’d worked for in Central Jersey, and he thought Gardner was throwing him a line, saving him from a life where his only choice was to represent guys who could get away with anything as long as they had a lawyer around to deal them a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Gardner pleaded not guilty to the charges related to Mulrooney’s murder and would not consider a deal, even when the Attorney General threatened to throw him to the feds on racketeering charges. They could not nail down a motive; they didn’t even have a starting point.

Carvalho, who was about to lose his job because Rodrigo quite reasonably decided he would not take anyone hired by Gardner with him when he founded a new, separate firm, asked to stay on Householder’s case because he was convinced that Householder was not guilty.

Barba and Carvalho ran into each other one afternoon in the hallway, on the third day of Householder’s trial. “How are you doing, Raf?” Carvalho asked, his first attempt to genuinely reach out to his friend since February.

“Taking it day by day,” Barba said, a stock answer for someone he’d known for more than a quarter century.

“I’m sorry about Mulrooney. I had no idea Gardner was mobbed up.”

“Mulrooney was my brother. At least that’s what his aunts told me at the funeral. Do you know anything about why Gardner ordered the hit?”

“I don’t,” he said, “and I’ll share the little I know about Mulrooney after this trial is over. But trust me, there are good reasons why I’m defending Householder so zealously.”

Barba swallowed hard. “Olivia doesn’t agree.”

“Let her think what she wants.”

“Andy?”

“Hm?”

“I’m sorry for what I did without Householder’s consent. I know it doesn’t change anything, but the guilt will stick with me forever.”

“If I’m right, your shooting had nothing to do with you flipping that switch this winter.”

“You’re a good man, Andy, staying with Householder after all that’s happened.”

“I’m a stupid man.”

“You’re a Harvard Law graduate.”

“That doesn’t preclude stupidity.”

“A Harvard Law graduate who is about to get a not-guilty verdict for a man who confesses every day to the crime he’s charged with. I’m impressed with how you were able to convince Judge Pepitone to give you that continuance so you could talk Householder into pleading not guilty.”

Carvalho reached out to pat Barba’s arm. “I’m not quite over what you did, but you didn’t deserve to be put through a murder trial, and you didn’t deserve to be shot. If Householder goes free, the detectives can focus on finding the person who actually attempted to kill you.”

He was right. If Householder, the man who was tackled to the ground with the weapon immediately after Barba was shot, the man who’d confessed to the crime, was excluded, then homicide could turn its eyes to the COs union, to Felipe Heredio — who was allegedly making death threats against Barba long before the Munson case was in his sights — to a hundred other suspects who’d crossed his path during his twenty-one years as a prosecutor.

A hundred other suspects who were still out there.

That afternoon, he found himself staring at the glass-encased bullet on his desk. He’d stood up to those death threats when he was getting them regularly, in ways ranging from completely ignoring them to handing Heredio his home address. Now it was different. He knew what it was like to almost die; maybe more importantly, he knew what it was like to be terrified of leaving a romantic partner and her child behind.

He went back to the cases in front of him.

Near the end of the work day, Benson burst in, clutching a manila envelope in one hand and her phone in the other. Both hands were shaking.

“Rafa,” she said, her voice dripping with anger and, if he wasn’t wrong, fear.

Alarmed, he jumped up from his chair as she closed the door behind her. “Que pasó?”

“As I was leaving the courtroom after testifying at Householder’s trial this afternoon, I was served with _this_.” She handed him the envelope and hit redial on her phone, throwing it to the carpet in frustration when the other party didn’t answer.

Barba flipped through the paperwork inside. “She can’t do this,” he said. “She literally, legally, cannot do this.”

Sheila Porter, who’d just been discharged from a mental health facility after less than six months, a sentence that included no prison time even though she’d kidnapped her five-year-old noncustodial grandson and assaulted his police lieutenant mother, was suing for full custody of Noah. She wanted the adoption vacated on the basis of fraud.

“I can’t reach Langan,” Benson said.

The last time he’d heard that level of panic in her voice was when Noah was kidnapped.

Barba pounded a fist against his desk. “These are some heady accusations Sheila and her lawyer are making. You’d think Langan would want to defend himself.”

“You’re saying you think they’re true?”

“Listen,” Barba said, grasping both her arms and catching her gaze, “even if they are true, no judge will vacate an adoption when there are no allegations of abuse. That would be unprecedented.”

“The word “unprecedented” means nothing to me. I’ve bene through at least four things that are either legally or forensically unprecedented.”

“Family court’s main tenet is to abide by the child’s best interest.”

“You and I have both seen family court screw that up before.” She picked her phone up off the floor, set it on Barba’s desk, and held her hands up in front of her, as if trying to restrain herself from falling into complete outrage. “Okay. What do we do now?”

As she was asking the question, her phone began to play its repetitive ringtone.

All Barba heard from Benson was a loud “WHAT?” followed by a slightly-less-loud “where?” She said goodbye, thanked the caller, and stuffed the phone into the pocket of her blazer. “It’s Langan,” she said, covering her mouth with one hand.

“That was him?”

“No. Trevor Langan’s body washed up on a Staten Island beach this morning. He was just identified an hour ago.”

“Come with me,” Barba said, taking Benson’s hand and leading her out into the hall. “Do you trust me?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted.

They went down to the second floor courts, where Barba carefully scanned the hallways, turning his head slowly to the left, then to the right, registering every defense attorney who was present. “Rita doesn’t practice in family court,” he said, “and I’m not allowed to represent a private client because I’m a prosecutor. We need to get Noah an attorney right now. Trust me for five minutes?”

Benson nodded. She gritted her teeth, though, when Barba located Randy Dworkin and pulled him aside. “I would not do anything to hurt Noah,” Barba promised her.

“I know. It’s hard for me, after Sheila.”

“Do you practice in family court?” he asked Dworkin.

“Sometimes. What’s this about?”

“I need you to be a pest.”

“That’s my calling card.”

Barba quickly explained the situation with the custody suit and Trevor Langan. “Grandmother’s not locked up for a premeditated kidnapping?” Dworkin asked.

“She got six months in a mental health facility.”

“When she planned the kidnapping months in advance? Now I’ve got to cross New Hampshire off the list of states I want to move to when I retire. Tell me you have restraining orders.”

“Yes,” Benson said, “Langan filed them. I have copies at home.”

“Let me see the custody suit, and I’ll be —”

“You’ll be Noah’s legal representation even if it’s just for a few days,” Barba said, “and you’ll march down to Langan’s office and pester them until they’ve given you all his files related to Noah.”

“Gotcha.”

By evening, Dworkin had acquired all the files he needed. He went over to Benson’s place after Noah was in bed and broke the news to Benson and Barba: “Your buddy Langan knew that Johnny Drake was Noah’s biological father and that Ellie’s mother was still alive and well. That’s where the accusation of fraud is coming from. What did Langan get in return from you?”

“Excuse me?” Benson said. She looked like she was ready to flip the dining room table.

“I’m trying to help,” Dworkin insisted. “There are very good arguments for why it’s not in the child’s best interest to vacate the adoption, and I want to make sure I am able to throw the best possible argument at the court.”

Barba huffed loudly. “They only vacate adoptions when there’s fraud together with abuse or neglect.”

“Sorry, Harvard Law, but the statute says fraud alone is sufficient, so if we get an asshole judge, we might not be able to appeal.”

Barba smashed the heel of his hand into his forehead. “I hate it when you know what you’re doing,” he grumbled.

“So, Liv, anything you can think of, any favors you might have inadvertently done for Langan?”

“Favors,” she repeated, exasperated.

“Inadvertently.”

“No. I will go through past cases where Langan was the defense attorney after I adopted Noah, if you need me to.”

“Please,” Dworkin said.

“I can’t believe —”

“I mean, it’s possible he pushed the adoption through for noble reasons, but he still went about it fraudulently.”

“She’s not to lose Noah,” Barba said sharply. “She is not to come anywhere close to losing Noah. Do we understand each other?”

“Did I get you a not guilty verdict on murder charges where the papers were calling you the Baby Killer ADA?”

“Randy.”

“Yes. Of course we understand each other. You can count on me. I don’t like that Ms. Porter can file a lawsuit and try to take a boy away from the only mother he’s ever known.”

After Dworkin said goodnight and disappeared into the elevator, Benson turned to Barba. “He’s a clown, but I feel like we’re in good hands.”

Barba nodded. “I’m not allowed to represent Noah, but I will throw as many law libraries as I can at Shiela Porter. She won’t come between you and your son.”

“My detective gut says there’s something I wasn’t told. A person doesn’t go from zero to carefully premeditated kidnapping in a year. I’ve never seen it in more than 25 years with SVU. I would like to believe that Langan knew something about Sheila and was protecting Noah.”

“It’s that idea again, that some awful people can show perfectly non-awful faces to the rest of the world. The question here is whether that person was Sheila, or Langan, or both.”

“I don’t know,” Benson said. “I’m worried.”

“He’s five. He’s lived with you since he was six months old. Removing him from your custody would be cruel.” As they stood together in the kitchen, she leaned towards him for comfort, and he obliged, wrapping his arms around her. “It’s all right,” he assured her, kissing the side of her face, “they won’t take him away from you. I’d burn down the courts before I’d let anyone hurt Noah.”

He heard the promises falling out of his own mouth and wondered if he, a man who shared his name with an awful, irredeemable father, a man who’d let his mother, his boss, and his friends down when he uncharacteristically flipped a switch that he had no right to flip, could possibly keep those promises.

—

“We have a problem,” Casey Novak told Jack McCoy the evening before closing arguments were scheduled for the Householder trial.

McCoy leaned back in his cushioned office chair. “Other than “this case is going to verdict despite the defendant confessing every day”? I thought I’d seen some doozies when I was downstairs.”

“I just came from a meeting with Lieutenant Bernard. He decided to dig a little deeper. Why he couldn’t do this before the trial, I don’t know. We’ve got a big problem with Householder’s lawyer.”

“Carvalho?”

“He worked for one of the mobbed-up firms in New Jersey in the 90s, and was recently deposed in the case against Fred Gardner. Gardner, who’s now awaiting federal trial for the murder of Kevin Mulrooney, hired him out of the mobbed-up firm.”

“What do you have on him?”

“According to Bernard, Carvalho was at the courthouse representing a client the day Barba was shot. He never came forward with that information. And a similar model gun is registered to him. It’s circumstantial because the serial numbers were filed off the weapon used to shoot Barba, but that plus the fact that he _never once_ came forward about being in court on February 7th is strong circumstantial evidence. If we can confirm that the weapon was the same one registered to him, we’ve got him, not Householder, on this.”

“Then why would he so persistently defend Householder?”

“I don’t know. Lieutenant Bernard wants to check with the feds about talking to Gardner.”

McCoy let out a “hm.”

“What?” Novak asked.

“Our usual link between the feds and the city is Captain Alexandra Eames. Gardner’s accused of hiring the hitman who killed Kevin Mulrooney.”

“I need to draw a map,” Novak said. “I need four ibuprofen, and then I need to draw a map.”

“I’m on thin ice already with my constituents. As for a short continuance before closing arguments, let Bernard do what he wants to do, and if he’s right, we’ll issue a warrant for Carvalho’s arrest and brace ourselves for the fallout from a mistrial.”

—

Carisi ignored the first call from Rita Calhoun on Sunday evening because he was eating dinner with his family, and Rita Calhoun had a habit of calling detectives on their personal cellphones on weekends when she was working on discovery for important cases. 

“So,” Gina said, “nobody say anything stupid. Promise none of you will say anything stupid?”

Bella cringed, but nodded affirmatively.

“I’m pregnant,” Gina told her family.

A few _hey_ s and _congratulations_ echoed from the table, together with Teresa’s “It’s not Kevin’s, is it?”

Bella raised her glass. “You win, Teresa.”

“For what?”

Teresa’s 18-year-old daughter Mia jumped in. “For saying the stupidest possible thing you could have said, Mom.”

“Of course it’s Kevin’s, you moron, I’m ten weeks.” Gina waved her fork in Teresa’s direction. “I think it happened the night before he was killed. I didn’t want to say anything last month because it was so early, but when I found out, I cried, ‘cause it’s like there’s going to be a piece of him still in the world.”

Sonny Carisi was generally incapable of death glares, but he quickly death-glared across the table at Teresa before warmly congratulating Gina.

Carisi’s phone rang again. Calhoun usually left a message and waited until Monday because she knew she was pressing her luck as it was by calling detectives and prosecutors on weekends.

“I have to take this,” he announced, and hurried into the living room. “Rita?” he said into the phone.

“I’m leaving Rikers with Andy. He was just bailed out after being charged with the attempted murder of Rafael Barba. Jack McCoy is an asshole. This is an obvious frame-up from Fred Gardner.”

His stomach and chest filled with panic for Carvalho. “You want me to see if I can get a police detail on him?”

“NYPD won’t do that,” Calhoun snapped, “because they think he shot Rafael, our friend of 25 years, when Gardner asked him to.”

“You don’t believe that, right?”

“Of course I don’t fucking believe it.”

“It’s just that defense attorneys usually —”

“A fucking frame-up. Andy hasn’t owned a gun since he worked for that firm in Jersey. Somebody over there probably had a copy of the old registration and forged a current one to match the gun that shot Rafael. That’s how they got him. And Andy swears up and down that he was in his office on February 7th. Somebody signed in as him. Are you home? I’m taking him to your place.”

“Why?”

“You know why. I told Andy I wouldn’t represent him unless he disclosed every conflict of interest he’s been caught up in during the last ten years, regardless of whether they involved his dick or didn’t involve his dick. He’s upset, for obvious reasons.”

“I’m —”

“Take care of him while he’s going through this. And say a prayer that McCoy gets swallowed up by some nasty hellfire for what he’s doing to the Harvard Law Class of ’96. We’ll see you at home in about two hours.”

“All right. Call me when you’re downstairs.”

Bella joined her brother in the living room. “Everything all right?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“Sonny.” She placed a hand on his back, her voice cracking with concern. “What happened?”

“You’ll hear on the news a story about a lawyer named Andy Carvalho,” Carisi said, “and none of that story is true.”

“What am I —”

“You’re gonna hear that Carvalho shot Barba on the orders of the same man who hired the hitman who killed Kevin.”

“Andy is —”

“He’s being framed. He was involved with a shady law firm a long time ago, but it was all stupidity, not criminality on his part. Andy might be staying with me for a while. Do not, under any circumstances, let Gina know. She doesn’t need the extra stress of knowing that my —”

“Boyfriend?”

“Yeah, okay, she doesn’t need the extra stress of knowing that my friend who I’m with whenever he’s in town is accused of attempting to carry out a hit for the same man who got her fiancé killed.”

Bella’s eyes were wide with worry. “Go hold him, promise him everything’s going to be all right,” she said, “and when this all blows over, bring him by me and Tommy’s place for dinner.”

He hugged Bella. “I’m lucky to have you, you know.”

Carisi told the rest of his family that he was being called into work, congratulated Gina again, and drove home to Brooklyn, over the longest bridge in the country, to wait for Calhoun and Carvalho.


	9. Chapter 9

Calhoun and Carvalho arrived at Carisi’s apartment fifteen minutes after Carisi himself got home. He was worried that Carvalho would be uncomfortable in the one-bedroom fourth-floor walkup, but when he saw the defense attorney’s face, he knew that the size and layout of his apartment would be the last things on his mind.

Carvalho was always smiling, often flirty when they were together, a sweetness in him that belied his reputation as a stalwart, clever top-tier defense attorney. Tonight, his expression was blank, his mouth half-open, eyes unblinking. Carisi wanted to hug him, assure him that everything was going to be all right, even though he knew, as a detective, that everything wasn’t going to be all right for a long time.

“Let’s talk for a few minutes,” Calhoun said, her voice slightly — only very slightly — gentler than usual. She and Carvalho sat together on the couch and she reached out to pat his arm. 

“To be honest with you,” Carisi said, “from the point of view of a detective, I can see how Bernard would have come to the conclusions he did when he doesn’t know that Barba and Mulrooney are brothers, that there’s a real connection between the two murders.”

Carvalho let out a shallow sigh, keeping his eyes fixed on the wall. “It was obvious to me and at least two people on my team, but we weren’t looking at Mulrooney from the “he’s Barba’s brother” angle. We thought somebody from the COs union asked Mulrooney to kill Barba.”

“Tell me everything,” Calhoun said, shifting further towards him. “If you don’t want to do 20 to life for a crime you had no hand in, I need everything you had up your sleeve for the Householder case.”

“Should we ask Sonny to —”

“No. He’s allowed to practice law, so he’s here for a consult as far as I’m concerned, which means attorney-client privilege applies. We can use his input as a detective. Worse comes to worse, if they ask him about this conversation, you’ll get married.”

“See how much federal protection there still is on that in a year,” Carvalho said, finally leaning back and letting his shoulders drop. “I started with the fact that Raf had been threatened by at least two parties, the COs and whoever was paying Felipe Heredio, to establish reasonable doubt. We discovered that the former union president, who was voted out because he was more concerned with protecting guys like Munson than with negotiating salaries and benefits for the non-Munsons, had visited several prisoners, including Mulrooney.”

“You think Mulrooney shot Barba?” Carisi asked, incredulous, a thousand scenarios already running through his mind about how he was going to break that news to Gina.

“I don’t. When we looked into it, there’s no way Mulrooney shot Barba. He was at work that day, and our witnesses all have very scrambled, very different memories, but their one point of agreement is that the shooter was tall.”

“Which excludes Mulrooney,” Carisi said, one leg bouncing up and down.

“And, to Bernard, doesn’t exclude me. I match the one-word description: _tall_. That’s evidence to NYPD. Anyway, what we do think is that the union head at some point asked Mulrooney to kill Barba.”

“So Mulrooney must have owed somebody something,” Carisi suggested.

“We thought at first that he owed the COs, because he’d only served eight years. But that only makes sense if he served eight years of a 25-year sentence.”

Carisi’s eyes lit up. “You think somebody made that eight to ten year sentence for premeditated murder happen?” 

Carvalho nodded.

“Then we’re potentially dealing with a corrupt judge,” Calhoun said.

“Judge Gary Feldman. Ambitious guy once upon a time, thrown to the wolves after colluding with McCoy to hide a witness.”

Calhoun punched the sofa cushion. “I heard about that. They both got off with a slap on the wrist. When Feldman died last year, there were rumors that some middle-management Masuccis were at the funeral.”

“It’s possible, but loosely circumstantial,” Carvalho said, “that the Masuccis paid off or threatened Feldman so he’d give Mulrooney a lesser sentence. When he got out, Mulrooney was supposed to pay them back by murdering Barba for the COs.”

“What link was there between Mulrooney and the Masuccis that they’d do him a favor in the first place?” Calhoun asked.

Carvalho shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Carisi could tell from the way he flinched that Carvalho was lying.

“NYPD has got to put a detail on you,” Carisi said, now worried about what Fred Gardner’s link to the Masuccis meant for Carvalho. “Even if you’re charged with a crime, you deserve —”

“Sonny. Don’t worry about me.”

“I can’t help it,” Carisi admitted.

“They need me alive and convicted so Gardner walks free, and so whoever really shot Rafael is never caught.”

Calhoun stood up. “We’re due in court at ten tomorrow. I’ll make a motion to dismiss all charges pending further investigation, and if for some reason the motion actually gets through, I’ll ask Lieutenant Bernard to make it look like they’re investigating you and only you. Carisi, you can back me up with NYPD on that?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think they’ll drop the charges, Rita,” Carvalho said. 

“Can’t hurt to ask, or demand.”

“Go big or go home, right?”

“Don’t keep him up too late, Carisi,” Calhoun said before opening the door and heading for the stairwell.

When she was gone, Carvalho let out a long, slow breath, as if he was breathing for the first time in 24 hours.

“I need to take a shower,” he said, shrugging off his dark purple zip-up sweatshirt. “I’ve been in lockup for a few hours before for contempt of court, but Rikers, Rikers was something else.”

Carisi closed the space between them and wrapped his arms around Carvalho’s waist. Carvalho looked into his eyes with a a hint of wistfulness.

“Sonny,” he said, lifting his hands to touch Carisi’s cheekbones and temples, “you shouldn’t have to have more on your plate than you can handle on account of me, whether it’s death threats or anything else.”

Carisi kissed him. “The night Corman killed Jules Hunter, you were there for me like nobody’s been there for me in a long time.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“And,” Carisi said, smiling, “you call me Sonny.”

“Sonny,” he said teasingly, moving his lips to Carisi’s neck, “you want me to say your name some more?”

“I thought you wanted to take a shower.”

“It can wait..” Carvalho pulled Carisi flush against him. “You want to help distract me? I need to be distracted tonight.”

“Yeah.” The two men found themselves forehead-to-forehead, smiling in spite of the charges facing Carvalho. “Whatever you need, I’m here.”

Carvalho would groan _Sonny_ at least ten more times during the next half hour, finally shouting out, “Sonny, you feel so good, I love you, Sonny,” as he came. Carisi flinched beneath him, but ignored the outburst as if he hadn’t heard it — of course he’d heard it, how could he not — and kissed Carvalho before he went to take the shower he’d spoken of earlier.

“I am a stupid man,” Carvalho said when he returned to the bedroom wrapped in a towel.

“You should always pack extra underwear in case you’re framed for a crime.”

Carvalho narrowed his eyes. “Thanks for the advice, but that’s not why I’m a stupid man.”

“No, seriously, none of this is your fault.”

“I’m stupid because I didn’t follow my instincts when a few things — a lot of things — seemed off about the first firm I worked for. I should have followed my ex-wife’s instincts. She was the one who told me to quit and get a job pushing paper for the state if I had to, but I told her she was paranoid and watched too many police procedurals.”

“Hey.” Carisi sat up so he could massage Carvalho’s shoulders. “You don’t owe me any information, but there’s something you left out from the story you told Rita before. What was it?”

“I don’t want to see anyone hurt.”

“I get that. But nobody wants to see you hurt either. McCoy’s got blinders on lately. You could be convicted of a crime you didn’t commit, and the people you care about will be hurt regardless.”

“Strong argumentation skills for a fraud prosecutor.”

Carisi laughed. “As soon as NYPD forgets that I was almost killed a couple months ago, fraud prosecutor might be my next step.”

His phone chimed on the night table and he reached for it. When he read the text message on the screen, he let out a sigh.

“Work?” Carvalho asked.

“No.” He put the phone down and resumed massaging Carvalho’s shoulders. “That was Rollins, my partner. Our lieutenant might lose custody of her son because the attorney who handled the adoption may have rushed it through fraudulently.”

“There’s your fraud.” Carvalho pursed his lips. “You’re talking about Olivia Benson, yes?”

“Her son’s only five. He’s been with her since he was six months old. The attorney pushed the adoption through even though the kid had a living maternal grandmother.”

“The grandmother’s the one suing?”

“She’s done that before. She’s also kidnapped Noah.”

Carvalho turned around, lifting his legs up onto the bed. “How long ago?”

“Just after Thanksgiving.”

“Six months ago? She won’t be eligible for a custody hearing for years.”

“The stautes allow a family court judge to vacate the adoption.”

“Yes, but no judge in their right mind would do that without allegations of abuse or neglect.” He flipped his half of the comforter so it covered his legs and waist, and laid down on the pillow. “Look, Sonny, I don’t want anyone to get hurt, that’s what I keep saying, but if there’s a kid involved, that’s another story altogether. Olivia is still with Raf, right?”

“As far as I know.”

“Juliana, my ex, had a cousin who was an enforcer for the Masuccis in Long Branch. That’s how she was tipped off about the firm I was working for, and I didn’t believe her because I’m stupid, and even when I finally realized that she was right, I had nowhere else to go so I stayed with the firm. Anyway,” he said, rolling over so he was facing Carisi, “because of this cousin and a few nosy aunts and uncles, we found something out about a friend that the friend himself doesn’t know, and still doesn’t know.”

“Rafael?”

“His father worked for the Masuccis. He was their link to Red Hook and a few off-the-radar ports in the Bronx. He made a lot of money that way, and spent it on everything, everyone, except for Raf and Lucia. A really selfish, cruel person.”

“At Mulrooney’s funeral, his aunts were praising Rafael Barba Sr. like the guy hung the moon.”

“It’s strange, isn’t it?”

“We see it a lot with abusers,” Carisi said, for the first time wondering what half-healed scars had led Barba to interfere so recklessly in a family’s right-to-die case the way he did. For the first time, he seriously considered that maybe Barba hadn’t simply pulled an out-of-nowhere heel turn on that winter night. “So I get what you’re saying, though. The link between the law firm you used to work for, Fred Gardner, you, Rafael Barba, and Kevin Mulrooney is the Masucci family.”

“And this is why I’m a stupid man. I set this all into motion because of a job I accepted almost twenty-two years ago.”

“You can’t think like that,” Carisi said, placing a hand on Carvalho’s chest, near his heart. “You can’t. It doesn’t help anyone.”

Carvalho covered Carisi’s hand with his own. “What I said before in the, ah, heat of the moment,” he began, and Carisi turned his eyes away sheepishly but kept his hand firmly over Carvalho’s heart, “it’s only been, what, two months, but I’m old, you’re getting lots of silver fox streaks there yourself, and given that I’m probably being framed by my boss and the Masuccis, it’s much later than I thought, so, I meant it, you know. I meant it.”

Carisi turned his eyes back to the man next to him and smiled reflexively. He felt his eyes burning, followed by an unfamiliar warmth in his torso. 

“Sonny,” Carvalho said, closing his hand over Carisi’s, “you don’t have to say anything. I’ve been there.”

Still smiling, Carisi closed his eyes and pressed his face into Carvalho’s collarbone. “I’ve been there,” Carvalho said again, petting Carisi’s hair. 

“I love you, though,” Carisi said. 

However late it may have been, Carisi was, in that moment, young again.

—

Barba saw the panic in Benson’s face when she shuffled into her bedroom — their bedroom, maybe, five or six nights a week — holding her smartphone in one hand, scrolling with her thumb, biting her lower lip. “We have a court date,” she said.

“You spoke to Dworkin?”

“Just now. I went downstairs, outside, since I don’t want Noah to overhear.” She closed the door behind her. “He’s sleeping. I checked, but keep your voice low, because he cannot know what’s happening with the awful grownups in his life.”

“Why would they set a court date so soon?” 

“Dworkin’s pissed. This is a hearing where a family court judge will decide whether to vacate the adoption. We’ve only got three weeks.”

“Fuck,” Barba said, throwing off the covers and going over to her. “You’d think the DA would put his foot down, but he couldn’t get me, so it’s as if he’s going after my family and friends now.”

He caught a sad, trembling smile on Benson’s face. “Of course I know that’s not what McCoy’s doing,” Barba continued, “but it feels that way.”

“You think of me as your family?”

He thought of her and Noah as his family these days, but the spectre of the man with whom he shared a name wouldn’t let him admit that. 

She touched his face and ran her thumb across his cheek, the hollows still remaining beneath his eyes following his ordeal in February. 

“They can’t do this,” he said. “Do you have ACS on your side? None of this is in Noah’s best interest.”

“Dworkin has three social workers who’ll say exactly that at the hearing.”

“We see so many screwups in our jobs, so many cases where family court doesn’t intervene to remove a child from the custody of an abusive parent, to protect a child, to protect a domestic violence victim who wants out, and here they are trying to vacate your adoption on a narrow statute.”

“I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t know. We have three weeks. Dworkin says ACS is going to recommend that if the adoption is vacated, Noah stays with me as a foster child until the lawsuit is settled or decided, since I’m his mother, for God’s sake. If it’s vacated, my time with him becomes a ticking clock, one or two years at most.”

“Liv,” was all he could say as he pulled her close.

“By his eighth birthday he could be in the custody of the woman who carefully plotted to kidnap him and clubbed me with a fireplace rod when I came to get him back.” Swallowing a lump in her throat, she added, “by his eighth birthday, he might not be my son anymore. What kind of world is that?”

“Not a just one. Listen to me.” He looked into her eyes, his expression serious, focused. “ _If_ it looks like Sheila’s going to win her suit, _if_ it looks for a moment like a judge will order Noah removed from your custody, him and you and I will leave the country. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but we’ll do what we have to.”

“There must be something else going on with Sheila, “ Benson said, not quite acquiescing to Barba’s plan. “I’ve been too empathetic. I’ll bet I could find ten thousand people with the same diagnoses Sheila has who _didn’t_ carefully plan, step by step, to kidnap a five-year-old.”

Barba returned to bed, not letting go of Benson’s hand until he was under the covers. When she joined him, he grasped her hand again.

“I remember hearing about the sentence and thinking it only seemed appropriate if she’d grabbed him and driven away with him in the moment,” he said. “But the premeditation means —”

“Dworkin says she must know a whole lot of important people in New Hampshire.”

“I told you, if it comes down to the wire, I’ll make sure Noah stays with you.”

“I’d like to believe that Trevor Langan was generally a good person,” Benson said. “I don’t know what that means about me — after Sheila, after a lot of similar mistakes I’ve made in judging people’s character — but my gut tells me that whatever shady activity Langan was involved in was the reason he knew Sheila Porter shouldn’t have custody of Noah. If he pushed the adoption through knowing about both Johnny D and Sheila, then Sheila was in his mind as unfit to take care of Noah as Johnny D. I think there’s more to her story than we know.”

“Only problem with that,” Barba said, “is that for as many times as the courts may fail us, there’s a reason we have judicial systems in place, there are reasons we stay away from what Jack McCoy calls” — here he scrunched up his face and did his best impression of the DA — “vigilante justice.”

“What’ll it do to Noah if he’s taken out of the only home he’s ever had?”

“I know, querida. We will do what we have to do. No vigilanteism, no revenge, just what’s in Noah’s best interest.”

He thought briefly of Mulrooney, whose murder of Boz Burnham was now said to be “justified” — at least in the papers — since Burnham’s second wife had come forward to say that he’d tried to murder her shortly before he was killed, and that she believed he was guilty of the murder of his first wife. But there was no death penalty in New York, and if convicted, Burnham would have probably taken a plea for 20 to 25 years.

Barba rolled onto his back, and Benson curled up next to his shoulder. “It’ll be okay,” he said, a promise he wasn’t sure he could keep. “We’ll figure out what’s up with Sheila Porter, and we won’t let her win.”

“I’d love to believe that,” Benson said, choking back tears.

He kissed the top of her head. “Believe it.”

She took a deep breath, laid a hand on his belly, and soon seemed to doze off, though he knew her very-justified worries would likely reawaken her soon.

After a blink or two, he found himself walking along the beach where still-unfamiliar, always-changing stars punctuated the horizon.

He didn’t panic.

For almost two months, he’d sat in Dr. Lindstrom’s office, describing the island, describing the terror he felt each time, knowing he might not return home to the people he loved. He knew he must have finally made an ounce of progress, because tonight he didn’t try to run, negotiate, or swim away.

The Island of Discarded ADAs was, at last, merely a lucid dream.

He walked towards the bar on the outside desk where the ghosts usually hung out, a concept that made perfect sense inside the dream, _the bar where the ghosts usually hung out._

The bar itself was dark, but the deck was lit with outdoor lamps shaded in violet and blue. Kevin Mulrooney sat alone at a table, sipping white wine. He’d swapped his white undershirt for a red floral Hawaiian shirt that did not match his swim trunks.

“Salve,” Barba tried.

Mulrooney raised his glass. “English still works, don’t worry.”

“Aren’t you —”

“As a doornail.” He licked his lips, winced, and took a long drink of wine. “Apparently, to ease you into it, they don’t make you speak Latin until you’re eligible to haunt people.” 

“Until you’re eligible to haunt people,” Barba repeated.

“Not that I’d haunt anyone,” Mulrooney said, looking at the table rather than at Barba. “They’ll probably make me, though.”

Barba took the seat next to Mulrooney’s.

“Did they get the guys?’ Mulrooney asked.

Barba nodded.

“It wasn’t a robbery, was it?”

“No. I’m sorry. The man who shot you was a professional hitman. They know who hired him, but they don’t have motive.”

Mulrooney laughed. “You came here to ask if any one was out to get me?”

“I never come here on purpose.”

“Claire’ll be back soon. You look like you need your scotch. _Scoticis cupam_.”

“ _Was_ anyone out to get you?”

Mulrooney laughed again, this time letting all his teeth show in what might have been a grin if there had been any real joy whatsoever in his expression. “None of my answers are admissible in a court of law,” he told Barba.

“And you’re probably a figment of my imagination. But you’re also my brother.”

“Huh,” Mulrooney said, now finally looking at Barba, sizing him up. “I heard stories about my biological father but never his name.”

“I don’t know how the ethics of breaking the heart of a ghost in your dream work, but let me tell you, Kevin, our father put on a completely different face in front of your mother’s family than he did in front of me and my mother.”

“Yeah,” Mulrooney said slowly, “I figured he was at the very least not an upstanding citizen. I might not have a Harvard degree, I might have been the worst prosecutor in the history of the Manhattan DA’s office, but I get that there’s a reason I only got 8 to 10 years for a premeditated murder.”

Barba leaned in towards Mulrooney. “Did you shoot me?”

“You’re lucky I’m a slightly better person than the papers said I was. Oh,” Mulrooney said, a realization dawning on him, “ _oh_.”

“Andy Carvalho, Aaron Householder’s defense attorney, was looking at you as a source of reasonable doubt.”

“Oh my God,” Mulrooney said, scrubbing a hand over his face, “they asked me to kill you, and I refused. I was supposed to pay back a favor, wasn’t I?”

“Who’s “they”?”

“I don’t know.”

If this was indeed a lucid dream, nothing more — Barba hoped so — then Mulrooney wasn’t going to tell him anything he didn’t already know, anything he couldn’t reason out by himself.

“You swear you didn’t shoot me?”

“You think someone would have noticed if a man was shot by someone who looked like him.”

“A lot of people look alike.”

“Didn’t Carvalho already rule me out?” Mulrooney asked. “He was probably using my short sentence, and what I was asked to do, as evidence that a lot of people were out to kill you. That’s his reasonable doubt.”

“What did you owe? Why was that person so willing to help you?”

Mulrooney shrugged.

Barba stood, ready to leave, or at least ready to walk on the beach until he woke up in Olivia Benson’s bed, a lovely place, a safe place, to wake up.

“Rafael.” The name resounded awkwardly in Mulrooney’s throat. “I’m not supposed to do this,” he said, looking to his left and right, then lowering his voice, “but can you pass a message on for me?”

Barba nodded and sat back down.

“You talk to Sonny Carisi?”

“When we’re working. I still handle some of SVU’s cases, the ones that involve hate crimes.”

“Simple message,” Mulrooney said. “Tell Gina I love her.”


	10. Chapter 10

Dworkin was able to delay Benson’s custody hearing by another three weeks, but when he asked for more time beyond that, the judge accused him of trying to delay the proceedings until Noah’s eighteenth birthday. “So what if I am?” Dworkin said. “Absent abuse or neglect, vacating the adoption should be out of the question. Clearly there’s no concern whatsoever for Noah’s best interest.”

So all they had was three more weeks.

Benson was terrified.

She pushed through, though, just as she’d pushed through in February, but Barba could see the fear of impending doom on her face at night, when she paced the apartment instead of sleeping.

When she did sleep, he researched ways to get them out of the country, to a place where the mother and son could live without fear of extradition over an unjust custody battle. He hated the idea of pulling Noah away at such a young age from everything he loved and was familiar with, but if Sheila Porter was granted custody, she’d pull him away from all those things too, and from his mother.

There was more to Sheila Porter than the courts knew about her, there had to be. Benson and Barba were both convinced of this, regardless of how clouded their thinking was on account of the possibility of losing Noah.

Almost five years ago, Trevor Langan had volunteered to be Noah’s attorney. He’d never asked for money, not even standard legal fees. His interest in pushing the adoption through on fraudulent terms had to have been protecting Noah from his biological father and grandmother. 

Sheila Porter was born in New Hampshire in 1965 and had lived at ten different addresses, but had never lived outside the state save for the three months she’d lived in an illegal sublet in New York City, when she’d plotted to kidnap Noah. (“We need to keep emphasizing the plotting, the premeditation,” Barba had said, “to show how ridiculous the sentence handed to her in New Hampshire was.”) At 23, she’d married Rick Porter, also a lifelong New Hampshirite. Ellie was born the following year. Sheila and Rick had never been in any trouble with the law.

Benson, Barba, Dworkin, and the private investigator who worked with Dworkin were all stuck. 

There had to be more to Sheila Porter’s story.

Barba had often heard tales and warnings about the cycle of abuse, which was the reason he’d feared having children of his own and had avoided relationships that might put him in a situation where he’d have to take on the role of a parent. Noah was different: for some reason, with Noah, Barba’s personal history drove him to want, to need, to fiercely protect Noah with all his being.

On the day before Benson’s court date, Barba was sitting behind his desk, swiveling his chair back and forth and chewing on a pen as he tried to concentrate on a series of e-mails that had turned up in discovery on a case he was prosecuting. Concentration eluded him. All he could think about was Olivia and Noah, the two people he’d been most terrified of leaving behind when he was waking up from near-death.

Barba looked up when he heard a knock on the half-open door.

Carisi was standing in the doorway with a file tucked under his arm. “Last of what you need for discovery,” he said.

“Have you people never heard of couriers?” Barba asked, a smirk forming at the corner of his mouth.

Carisi dropped the file on Barba’s desk. “I only use ‘em for the new ADA.”

“How’s that working out?”

Carisi rolled his eyes. 

“That well, hm?”

“I don’t know what McCoy was drinking when he decided to replace you with the special prosecutor who handled your case. On top of that, the guy’s experience is entirely in homicide. On top of _that_ , he seems to have an attitude towards victims and survivors that’s … not ideal, to put it nicely. The lieutenant’s gonna throw him through a two-way mirror one of these days.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Barba said, in the moment very glad he hadn’t altogether resigned from the DA’s office like he’d planned to before he’d been shot.

“He won’t last a year. At least we still get to work with you on hate crimes, but I hear that may not be for long, Your Honor.”

“Close the door,” Barba instructed. “Where’d you hear that?”

Carisi shut the door behind him and returned to Barba’s desk. “Fordham rumor mill.”

“Carisi.”

“Or, from the most recent innocent person charged with attempting to murder you.”

“And what’s he doing sticking his overly large forehead in my business?”

“He does not have a —”

“Now all you’ll be able to think about for the rest of the day is what a ridiculously oversized forehead Andy has,” Barba said, his eyes hinting at a smile.

“He had dreams of the bench too. I guess Jack McCoy really does have an out for the Harvard contingent.”

Barba recalled the Latin-speaking ghost of Claire Kincaid tending bar on the Island of Discarded ADAs and wondered if Carisi knew just how pointed his remark was.

“Andy threw away his judicial ambitions years before any of this started,” Barba said.

“Oh, come on, that’s not fair.”

“There was a link between the COs and the Masucci crime family. The owner of the club where Kevin Mulrooney was shot was Masucci-linked too. Andy’s bad decisions from years ago could have helped put me on their radar, for all I know.”

Carisi sat on the couch, placed his hands behind his head, and let out a puff of air.

“Go on,” Barba said, “jump to his defense.”

“First tell me how come nobody knows you’re up for a judicial appointment.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“You changed it first.”

“Liv has enough on her plate as it is. She doesn’t need to think she has to take care of me when the state rejects my appointment.”

“What makes you think —”

“Stop. I’m sure you yourself don’t believe I’m bench material after what I did. There’s also the personal loan I gave to a strung-out witness. There’s _also_ the fact that half the state senate sees me as the asshole who deposed Alex Muñoz. End of story.”

“I don’t know. There’s always a reason to hold out hope.”

“Never knew you were that much of a Polyanna, Carisi.”

“Andy and Juliana said I could share this with you when the shit hit the fan, not that the shit hasn’t been repeatedly hitting the fan for the last four months, but neither of them had the — nerve — to tell you themselves.”

“I’ve had some strange dreams lately, but you becoming buddies with all my old Harvard friends was not one of them.”

Carisi huffed. “Trust me, this isn’t something you’ll want to hear from the press.”

“Let me guess: Juliana’s cousin, the Masucci’d up one, got Mulrooney that ridiculous sentence because Mulrooney was Masucci’d up too?”

“You’re off by a couple degrees.”

“Come on, Carisi. I know Andy was looking to Mulrooney for reasonable doubt.”

“Mulrooney wasn’t involved with the Masuccis himself, at least before he went to jail. The reason Judge Feldman was bribed or threatened into giving him such a lenient sentence is that Mulrooney was the son of a guy who connected the Masuccis to a lot of important ports.”

Barba blinked his eyes shut, processing Carisi’s revelation for a moment. “Can’t say I’m surprised,” he said flatly, but he was somewhat surprised, and in fact felt like a fool.

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

“You’re not,” Barba said. “If it helps prove that Andy’s being framed by Gardner and friends, it needs to be out in the open.”

He’d have to break this news to his mother in case it hit the media.

Maybe she already knew.

“Thank you, Carisi,” Barba said. “Honestly, I’ve been unfair to Andy because of a job he took when he was twenty-five.”

“Yeah. Yeah, again, I’m —”

“You do what you have to. For the record, unlike Lieutenant Bernard and Jack McCoy, I never believed for a second that Andy was a credible suspect. The higher-ups will sometimes convince themselves of anything, no matter how outlandish, to score a win. When I applied for a judicial appointment three years ago, I’d hoped to be on the bench before I became that kind of person.”

“You’ve still got a chance,” Carisi said.

“I don’t, but thank you nevertheless. As much as I knock Andy for what he did in his twenties, as much as he’s horrified by what I did in that hospital room this winter, the only reason we haven’t spoken since he was arrested is that I don’t want anyone to misinterpret anything either of us says as incriminating.”

“I get you. And hey, regarding your, uh, trial, we’ll let bygones be bygones, we’ll move on. We’ve been through enough.”

Barba patted the glass box on his desk that encased the bullet the surgeons had removed from his chest in February. “Nothing like a gunshot wound to earn you the forgiveness of Sonny Carisi.”

“I meant what you went through before you did what you did, everything that led to your decision.”

“Mind your business, Detective.”

“Right.”

“I’ll see you next Wednesday. I’m calling you as a witness in the Lerner case.”

“I’ll make sure my hair is tall enough to distract the jury.” Carisi was at the door now, fingers wrapped around the doorknob. “What it comes down to is that the Masuccis probably asked Kevin Mulrooney to kill you in return for his lenient sentence, a favor Mulrooney never asked for in the first place. Mulrooney said no.”

“Then why did they wait two more years to kill him?”

“You want my best guess?”

“I want your opinion as a detective first-grade.”

Carisi let go of the doorknob and swung his arms back and forth. “They kept him alive out of loyalty to your father. Since Mulrooney didn’t know who his father was or why he served only eight years for what should have been a longer sentence, he wasn’t going to talk, they had nothing to worry about. So they either killed him ‘cause they were suddenly afraid he’d eventually put two and two together, or they killed him ‘cause they were mad that their second attempt to kill you failed. Not that —”

“I understand.”

“Not that you pulling through is what got him killed. I’m not trying to say that.”

“The Masuccis were probably worried Mulrooney would figure out we were brothers when my shooting was all over the news.”

“Andy thinks he was just supposed to get Householder a reasonable sentence, not have him enter a not guilty plea and go to trial, and that’s why Gardner framed him. He must have had Andy on board as his back up plan all along. So the big question, then, in this case that neither of us should be involved in, is how did Aaron Householder know that somebody was going to shoot you that day?”

“Right.” Barba pulled the file at the edge of his desk closer. “Good question, one neither of us should be looking into.”

Barba didn’t bring the Householder question up with Benson that night because she already had enough on her mind. But Carisi was on to something; Householder probably didn’t grab the gun away from the shooter and take credit for the crime as the result of a split-second decision. Householder must have planned to confess to the crime, maybe because he wasn’t sure if he had anything left to live for, maybe because he was guilty of conspiracy, maybe both.

Either way, Householder knew who really tried to kill Barba.

Surely, Lietenant Bernard and all the homicide detectives working the case knew this, but couldn’t get Householder to talk.

And they, of course, were convinced of Carvalho’s guilt, because frame-ups of that scope didn’t happen in New York City anymore.

When frame-ups of that scope did happen in New York City, back in the 70s and 80s, there were always Masuccis behind them.

—

The next morning, Olivia Benson’s adoption of Noah Porter was vacated.

Barba sat in the gallery for the hearing, watching as Dworkin asked for another three weeks, as the judge denied his request, and as Sheila Porter’s lawyers presented their case for fraud.

Sheila herself wasn’t there. Her lawyers — how the hell could this woman afford a team of three attorneys? — must have told her to stay home, for fear of mid-hearing outbursts about Olivia Benson’s character.

When the judge ruled that the adoption would be vacated on the grounds of fraud committed by the late Trevor Langan, Benson’s mouth fell open. She stood with her hands flat on the table in front of her, unable to look at the judge as he “assured” her that Noah would continue living with her under foster status until the custody issue was settled. 

Barba read nothing but fury in Benson’s eyes when she went with the lawyers into the judge’s chambers.

When she walked out, her face was numb, expressionless. Dworkin was shaking his head in anger.

They walked right past Barba. He had to follow them out.

“Liv,” Barba said.

She didn’t turn around, so he caught up to them.

“Have your investigators look into every detail of Sheila’s life,” Benson said hoarsely, “and whatever your fees, whatever their fees, I’m good for all of it. They cannot do this to Noah.”

“I’m contacting the investigators and I’m also starting an appeal as soon as I get back to the office,” Dworkin promised. “What happened in there was a travesty.:

“Thank you,” Benson said, barely able to get the words out.

Once they were outside, Dworkin muttered, “Sheila Porter can go to hell,” under his breath and wished mock-pleasant “good afternoon”s to Benson and Barba.

“I, um, need to go home,” Benson said, staring straight ahead again. “Lucy’s picking Noah up from school, so they won’t be home until 3. Maybe I should pick him up early. But I don’t want to scare him. I don’t want him to worry.”

“We’ll go home and wait.”

“That’s probably better. I need to make some calls.”

In the cab, she didn’t say a word. She was silent, her eyes glassy, as they took the elevator up to her floor. It was when she fumbled at getting her key in the door to her apartment that she started to cry.

“Liv.” He put his arms on hers to steady her. “It’ll be okay. You’re his mother.”

“Don’t,” she said, shaking him off before successfully opening the door.

Inside, she dropped her purse, slapped a hand down on the kitchen counter, and wept.

Barba closed the door and ran to Benson, wrapping his arms around her sideways. She was trying to cry silently, but every few seconds a wail echoed from her throat.

He had to choke back tears himself.

When he blinked, a thousand tears fell anyway.

Benson sank to the floor, pressing her back to the wall and covering her eyes with one hand. Barba joined her, taking her free hand in both of his.

“I want to keep him safe from Sheila and God knows whatever else was out there that Langan didn’t tell me about, and I’ll do whatever I have to do, but I don’t want to take him away from everything he loves, everything that’s familiar to him. Who would do that to a 5-year-old unless they absolutely had to?” She flopped her head onto his shoulder, rolling her face towards his chest, and he felt her tears dampening his collar. 

“It’s okay,” he said, kissing the top of her head.

“No, it’s not.”

_I won’t let anybody hurt you or Noah, ever_ , he wanted to say, but she was already hurt, and he was afraid to make promises. If he hadn’t been shot in February, he’d have left the DA’s office and said goodbye to Benson for good. He’d have broken her heart. He’d have broken a thousand implicit promises he’d made to her over the last six years.

He gently ran a hand across her scalp, petting her hair as she cried. “I love you,” he said, the tears now in his voice and on his face too. He pressed his cheek to the top of her head and whispered another _I love you_ , his arms pulling her closer.

“When I was unconscious,” he said, “when I thought I was floating in the middle of the ocean, trying to get back to you, I heard you crying. I know it’s impossible, I _know_ it is, but I heard you.”

“Stay,” she muttered, clutching at his shirt. 

“I will.”

They say in silence for a while, holding each other, stuck to the floor.

He remembered the _not guilty_ on that terrible afternoon in February.

He remembered how Benson hugged him on his way out of the courtroom.

They were walking together, side by side, arms touching, and a sense of horrified guilt over what he was planning to do in 48 hours — leave her behind, because what good was he to her if he needed her to “fix” his near-criminal mistakes — washed over what was left of his soul.

This was the first time he’d recalled something that had happened after he’d left the courtroom.

He remembered being at the top of the courthouse steps, overhearing the Householders argue about whether they should take off or hang around to talk to the media. Maggie said she couldn’t believe what the DA had just put Barba through, and that Aaron needed to walk away.

If the recently-recovered memory was correct, then Aaron Householder had never left to retrieve a gun from his conveniently street-parked car.

He saw the shooter’s face as a single frame in his mind.

A single frame, a brief flash: Trevor Langan, pistol in hand, aiming for his heart.

_Trevor Langan_.

That couldn’t be.

Barba hoped the memory wasn’t a memory at all, but a psychological conflation of the trauma he’d experienced and the trauma Benson was experiencing now, as she wept in his arms.

Trevor Langan, his eyes focused, pistol aimed at Barba, _focused_ on shooting him through the heart.

He gasped reflexively.

“Rafa?” Benson asked, slowly lifting her head.

“I’m fine.”

She wiped a tear from his face and pressed her forehead to his. “I love you. Stay.”

He nodded, a hundred words and a single memory caught in his throat.

“When all this blows over,” she said, laughing through tears, “let’s get married.”

Barba felt himself smiling in spite of what his mind was telling him.

“I’m only, maybe, two-thirds kidding,” she said.

He leaned over to kiss her. “When you’re ready,” he said, “I’ll marry you in ten seconds. You don’t even have to tell me when, or what’s going on. Just throw me in a cab, take me to City Hall, and I’ll make every vow there is in the world to you and Noah.”

Why was he offering vows, and promises, when what he knew — what his memory was telling him, what he prayed was wrong — could rip Liv and Noah apart?

He wouldn’t let that happen.

If he told anyone about the flash of memory, if homicide looked into Langan as a suspect in the attempted murder, Benson would lose her son.

Langan would be linked to the Masuccis.

In the 80s, federal investigators broke up an adoption scam various Masuccis had been running for three decades. He’d studied those cases in a family law course at Harvard, and had cited them in briefs a few times.

If Langan was linked to the Masuccis, there was no way Dworkin’s appeal would go through.

Andy Carvalho, meanwhile, was awaiting trial for the same attempted murder, the result of a careful frame-up that had placed him in the courthouse when he was actually in his office upstate, one that had Barba shot with a gun that may have been registered to Carvalho twenty years ago.

If Barba didn’t tell homicide what he remembered, Carvalho could be found guilty of a crime someone else committed.

Either an innocent man would serve prison time or a child would be taken away from his mother. Harvard Law hadn’t prepared him for this.


	11. Chapter 11

“Oh, look,” Gina said, holding up a tiny sundress layered at least four times over with white-and-purple frills, “she needs this.” She held up the registry scanner that a store employee had entrusted her with, but Bella quickly snatched it away.

“First of all, you’re due in December. Kid’s not wearing a sundress in December. Second, for a newborn, all you need are bodysuits and stretchies. They spit up in everything.”

“She can’t have a few nice things?”

“You are not prepared for how much spit-up and shoulder poop you’re gonna see.”

“Please.” Gina flipped through a rack of one-piece pajamas. “Anyway, Teresa keeps saying I should go for gender neutral ‘cause she heard a lot of stories where the blood test was wrong. I get the 20-week sonogram in, like, three weeks, but she says they always get that wrong too. Nothing’s good enough for Teresa.”

“I’m telling you, kid’s just going to throw up on everything anyway.”

“I kinda hoped for a boy ‘cause I wanted to name him Kevin, but I’m having lunch with Kevin’s dad next week, so I’ll ask him about naming her after Kevin’s mom.”

“You talk to Kevin’s dad?”

“Yeah. It’s been … rough … you know. I was right there, right next to him, and couldn’t do anything. And the papers, all they wanted to write about was Kevin’s alter ego Gabrielle. Meanwhile his mom’s family in Ireland gives his dad a hard time because they were all huge fans of his biological father.”

“Screw them. Let’s go look at strollers.”

“It’s so hard, Bella, you don’t even know, with what all the papers say about Kevin, everybody thinks that’s the whole story just ‘cause it’s in the Daily News.”

On their way to the strollers, they passed what appeared to be a mother and her very pregnant teenage daughter. They remained engrossed in conversation on the other side of the wall that divided the two displays.

“Lauren said to get one of the ones you can snap the car seat into,” Gina said, pulling on the frame of the stroller in front of her.

“Those are good,” Bella said, reluctantly passing the scanner back to her sister, “but the clunky ones are really hard to fold.”

“Somebody’ll feel bad enough to get me a nice stroller, right?”

Bella suddenly nudged Gina, placed a finger over her own lips, and pointed at the wall. Behind it, the woman was talking to the teenager.

“You don’t have to make any decisions now,” the woman said. “Just take my card. I promise I can find your baby a good home.”

“I’m not going to be able to take care of him,” the girl admitted. “I want him to be adopted, but my parents are too embarrassed to talk to a lawyer.”

“A lot of people are. That’s why I can help. I work discreetly.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Gina said. The two Carisi sisters looped around the wall to the carseat display, where the woman was handing the teenager a business card. 

“Is everything all right?” Bella asked loudly.

“Honey,” Gina said, even louder, “my best friend adopted both her kids. Adoptions have to go through lawyers.”

“That’s not true,” the woman said. “Everything I do is legal. Please mind your own business.”

A store employee came over, and the woman, whose business card read “Rachel Langdon,” took off.

The employee, a floor manager, shook her head. “Sorry. We hadn’t seen her around for at least two years, and she just started showing up again.”

“Let me have the card,” Bella said, and the teenager willingly handed it to her. “Our brother works for Manhattan SVU. We can find out if —”

“We called the cops the first few times,” the manager said. “Nobody can do anything. What she said was true — adoptions don’t actually have to go through lawyers, and since all she does is chat up pregnant teenagers and give them her card, there’s nothing we can do. Definitely shady, though.”

Gina returned the registry gun and promised to come back for more. As they headed out to the parking lot, Bella nudged her sister again. “Look,” she said, holding out her smartphone, “I got Ms. Langdon’s picture. Since we’re already in Brooklyn —”

“You want to go see Sonny?”

“We’ve been saying for how long now that we’re gonna pay him a surprise visit one Saturday?”

“You think the boyfriend’s there?” Gina asked, settling into the driver’s seat.

“He lives upstate, but if he is, we both keep our mouths firmly shut, got it?”

“Fine. That woman in the store was a creep, anyway. Sonny’ll know if there’s something else they can do about her.”

They found street parking three blocks from Carisi’s place, not bad for a bright Saturday morning in Brooklyn, and rang his doorbell. “Swear to God, it’s important,” Gina said into the speaker. “We just saw something weird and crimey and you have to do whatever I say for a year ‘cause I’m a widow.”

Carisi blew a raspberry and buzzed them up.

He answered the door in a white undershirt, long blue pajamas, and messy gel-free hair. “Good morning to you,” Bella teased.

“I work long hours and Saturday’s my day to sleep.” He moved away from the doorframe and let his sisters inside.

“Where’s —” Gina started to say.

“Meeting with his attorney.”

“On a Saturday?”

“He’s about to go to trial for an attempted murder he didn’t commit. This is seven days a week for him.”

“Sorry,” Gina said. “But we weren’t kidding. Bella and I were at Big Box Baby making my registry and this creepy as hell lady — in her 50s, maybe — was telling a teenager she ran a private adoption service.”

Bella told Carisi exactly what they’d overheard, and what the store manager had explained to them. 

“Manager’s right,” Carisi said. “Unless the lady’s doing something illegal after she gets permission to place those babies for adoption, there’s nothing they can do.”

“But she probably is doing something illegal, right?”

“I don’t know, but I’m interested, ‘cause it’s happened before. My lieutenant first met her son when he was around three months old, when she was investigating a case where people who’d adopted their children could just “return” them through a shady service that wasn’t technically illegal. And here used to be a big adoption scam here and in Jersey in the 80s, where they’d tell a bunch of families there was a baby for them, collect fees, tell most of ‘em that it turned out there was no baby and the biological parents were scammers, and then keep all the fees and give the baby to whoever had paid the most. It was always the middlemen, not the biological parents, who were the actual scammers.”

“Maybe it’s that,” Bella suggested.

“Harder to do nowadays,” Carisi said, swiping a finger across his nose and adding, “it was the wiseguys, mostly. They’re not what they used to be. Younger generation’s not so dapper.”

Bella enlarged the picture on her screen. “Here,” she said, passing the phone to her brother.

Carisi’s eyes bugged out of his head.

He ran a hand through his hair and his fingers almost got stuck. “Hey, hey Bella, you wanna send me that picture?”

“Yeah, of course,” Bella said, immediately opening up a text message. “What’s going on? You recognize her?”

“I can’t comment. And I hate to be a bad host, but I need you out of here so I can make some phone calls. I’ll tell you this, though — what you just saw, the picture you took — might have helped a family out a whole lot, if we’re lucky.”

—

On Saturday night, two unlikely couples shared take-out Thai in Sonny Carisi’s apartment: the commanding officer of Manhattan SVU and the hate crimes ADA, and a Manhattan SVU detective and the man accused of attempting to murder the hate crimes ADA.

Barba put an arm around Benson when he leaned over to get a closer look at the photo on Carisi’s phone. “That’s her,” he said, looking over at Benson, whose eyes were still fixed on the screen. “This means there’s hope.”

Benson had a hard time believing that.

They had a custody hearing scheduled for November, only four months away. The fact that Sheila Porter had regularly come down to New York during at least the last five years so that she could offer pregnant teenagers a confidential adoption service, that she used a fake name, meant _something_ , but Benson knew better than to hold out hope.

Especially now, with her son’s adoption vacated, when the courts had decided she was his foster mother, his legal guardian, no longer simply his mother.

Benson reached for the legal pad on which Carisi had taken notes and slid it towards herself. “Rachel Langdon,” she said. “Langdon.”

“Hm,” was all Barba said.

“You know,” Carisi said, “rumor has it Trevor Langan was found in the East River because he was mobbed up.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Benson asked.

Carvalho leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Please, _please_ tell me this isn’t the Masuccis again.”

“A few of the families ran an adoption scam a long time ago,” Carisi said. “Could have been any of them.”

With his elbows planted on the table, Barba pressed his face into his hands.

Benson reached over and rubbed his back. 

“If Langan knew that Sheila Porter ran this scam for the mob,” Carisi continued, “which we don’t know, but the way she approaches teenagers in stores and then runs away smells of that to me, he might have put Noah’s adoption through the way he did in order to protect Noah.”

“I’d like to believe that,” Benson said.

Barba stood up and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket.

“Don’t worry about it, Raf,” Carvalho said.

Barba shook his head, pulled out a five-dollar bill, and laid it on the table. “Your law license is still active?” he asked Carisi.

“Yep.”

“I’ve just hired you as my attorney. Take the five dollars.”

Carisi picked up the bill and showed it to Carvalho. “My first fee,” he joked. “So this conversation’s privileged now?”

“Privileged and hypothetical,” was Barba’s answer. “Hypothetically, if some of the memories from the day I was shot came back —”

Carvalho held out a hand in Barba’s direction. “It would not be exculpatory for me in the least, but thank you for your effort.”

“Even if it’s sworn testimony?”

“Of a man who was unconscious for a week and couldn’t remember what happened until five months later?”

“Point taken.”

“Don’t say it,” Carvalho warned, “do not say it.”

Another memory lodged itself in Barba’s mind: the night before he testified at his own trial, he’d rehearsed how he was going to say goodbye to Benson right after he resigned, right before he skipped town. He’d tell her all the ways — most of the ways — she’d changed his life. And if she tried to tell him she loved him, those would have been his exact words: _don’t say it_. Any attempt at _I love you_ would have been met with _don’t say it_ , and in retrospect, if he hadn’t been shot right after the verdict, he’d have been an asshole, a horrible person, for how he would have left her.

“Oh,” Benson said, suddenly realizing. She put down her chopsticks and pushed her food away.

“Could just be a name she made up, out of whole cloth,” Carisi suggested.

“Then why do I remember —” Barba started to say, but Carvalho cut him off with an “Acabou! Enough.”

“If it’s not a name that Sheila made up,” Benson said, “then everything that’s happened to all of us in the last five months is connected through Trevor Langan.”

“Not through Langan,” Carvalho tried to assure her. “Through Fred Gardner and the late Frank Masucci. Through me. This may be all on me, all on my bad decisions from twenty-something years ago. I won’t have you and your child suffer on my account.”

—

Barba was on the landing at the top of the courthouse steps with Benson. Time crawled to a stop again and there was Langan’s face, Langan’s finger on the trigger again, still Langan, still the worst possible outcome for Olivia and Noah. _He’s got a gun!_ someone shouted, and Benson went to cover him, but then stopped in her tracks and screamed.

Langan was no longer pointing the gun at Barba. He had Noah by the arm.

“No!” Barba said. “That’s not how this is supposed to go. “Come for me, come for _me_ , leave him alone.”

Barba woke up crying.

It had been months since he’d last woken up crying, and before that, years.

Benson was already sitting up, standing actually, heading to the other end of the room to turn on the lights.

“Leave them off,” he said, his voice cracking on each word.

“Okay,” she said, returning to bed and laying a hand on his back. “You’re okay. You’re here with me. I promise.”

“You shouldn’t have to comfort me when you’re the one who —”

“It’s fair. Look what you’ve been through. Rafa, honey, do you think Trevor Langan shot you?”

“I dreamt he had — he had — Noah. I would not do anything that would make the courts want to remove Noah from your custody.”

“You’re going to have to tell Bernard. You know something that exonerates Carvalho. You have to come forward regardless.”

“I don’t _know_ what I know. It could be a false memory. Like Andy said, it probably won’t exonerate him at all because there’s no corroboration.”

“Rafa,” she said, her fingertips tracing his hairline, “we can get corroboration.”

“From —”

“Aaron Householder.”

Barba winced. “If he were to give up Langan, the COs who wanted me dead will have Householder killed and family court would have confirmation that Langan was a mobbed-up fraud. You and Noah do not want that confirmation.”

“If they can get Sheila on whatever the hell she’s been doing in those baby stores, we may not have to worry about losing Noah.” The _we_ was a slip of the tongue, but she decided to ride with it. “I’ll talk to one of my contacts with the feds on Monday. We’ll offer Householder witness protection.”

“We?” Barba said.

“Oh. I meant you were worried about me losing Noah too.”

“And I,” he said with a hint of a smile on his face, “was referring to _we’ll offer Householder witness protection_ , which you and I are in no position to do because I’m the victim in that case, but.”

“But?”

“You won’t lose Noah. We won’t. I love him, Liv.”

“I know.”

“We’ll make it through,” he tried to promise. 

“I hope so.”

—

“Captain Eames,” Carisi said, standing at his desk when he spotted SVU’s link to the feds walking towards him. “What brings you here?”

She handed him a set of folders bound by a thick rubber band. “I was in the neighborhood, thought I’d deliver the new files on the Lerner case.” She dropped the folders on Carisi’s desk. “Check the middle one. The middle one’s especially interesting.” She moved a few steps closer and lowered her voice. “We’ve been busy lately. Very busy. My desk’s a mess. I just grabbed what was on there and came by.”

The “middle folder” contained Xeroxes of all known women Masucci associates from 1960 through 1995. 

There was an extremely good reason why Sheila Porter had led such an unremarkable life in New Hampshire, the records of which existed only in the form of a series of addresses, before she went from zero to premeditated kidnapping in a matter of months. 

Frank Masucci’s granddaughter was the spitting image of Sheila, de-aged around thirty or thirty-five years.

Until 1987, Sheila Porter was likely Marla Masucci, who, as a teenager, pretended to be pregnant so she could get into support groups, where she’d convince actual pregnant teenagers to place their babies for adoption. She was one gear in the adoption scam machine run by the Masuccis in the 1980s. 

Marla Masucci testified against her uncles and went into witness protection. 

As Sheila, she might have returned to the family’s folds after her husband died or after Ellie left home.

Carisi wondered what her link to Langan was, if there was one at all, but couldn’t push that line of thinking because of how it might affect Noah’s impending custody case.

“Sonny, please,” Carvalho told him the next time he was in the city to listen to and turn down a new plea deal, “so much of this has to do with stupid mistakes I made when I was in my 20s that just … reverberated. I don’t want Olivia and her kid to lose each other.”

—

Aaron Householder, as it turned out, did not recognize the man who’d actually shot Barba. He’d known what was going to happen; a divorce lawyer he’d been consulting had originally asked Householder himself to kill Barba. Householder was physically unable to fire a gun, as the medical records showed, so he offered instead to take credit for the crime in exchange for the hundred thousand dollars that would be given to Maggie as a “settlement” of sorts so she could walk away from their marriage and their history as easily as possible.

This is what he told the judge at the deposition when he finally decided, upon Maggie’s urging, to clear his own name.

He testified that he didn’t know the name of the man who’d shot Barba that afternoon, but he could be certain that the man was definitely not Andy Carvalho. 

Rita Calhoun warned Barba that if he didn’t give a deposition too, Carvalho would spend at least twenty years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. McCoy still answered to the demands of the “I only have half the story but here’s my opinion anyway” letters to the editor in the Ledger. And Novak seemed overly concerned with proving herself after her temporary disbarment. They would keep pushing forward unless the people McCoy represented had good reason to believe the plain truth, that Carvalho hadn’t shot Barba.

“You’ve got to do it,” Benson said. “A man will be wrongfully convicted if you don’t.”

A law professor back at Harvard, one of few who still approached the law philosophically, had once told him that justice must never be a matter of _either-or_. 

She was probably referring to the powers that be who try to frame situations as _either-or_ when they are not, as if justice is finite, where if one person gets justice another loses out, where there’s not enough justice to go around.

Maybe that was this situation too.

Or, maybe idealism only got you so far.

Maybe love and justice were infinite, maybe there was always enough to go around, maybe, was what the part of him that nearly died on the courthouse steps wanted to say.

On a Monday morning in July, Barba gave a deposition in a courtroom that was closed to the public, even though the deposition would soon be available to everyone involved in Carvalho’s case. Barba told a judge, McCoy, Novak, and a court report that according to his memory, the man who’d shot him was Trevor Langan. 

Calhoun was confident that with Householder’s and Barba’s depositions in her pocket, she’d be able to petition the court to drop the charges against Carvalho. A motion was filed before the end of the day.

As expected, family court soon contacted Benson to let her know that on account of the new developments regarding the attorney who’d handled her adoption of Noah, they wanted a deposition from Benson herself in which she disclosed exactly how much she knew about Langan and whether Noah had any living relatives at the time of the adoption.

She _had_ known about Johnny D, and even though she’d eventually disclosed that, she feared it would be a problem. 

The custody hearing, meanwhile, was moved up to September.

“I’ll make it up to you,” Carisi told Benson. “I swear I’ll make all this up to you.”


	12. Chapter 12

While Rita Calhoun argued in front of a judge that the charges against Andy Carvalho needed to be dropped because two witnesses had come forward in sworn depositions to say that Carvalho was not the shooter, Carisi sat in the courtroom’s gallery to offer Carvalho emotional support.

In fact, that morning, a very worried Carvalho (who was pretending not to be very worried) had called Carisi his “emotional support puppy.”

“You’re calling a 37-year-old detective a puppy?” Carisi said.

“No,” Carvalho assured him, leaning in for a peck on Carisi’s lips as he adjusted his own tie, “I’m calling a 37-year-old detective _my_ puppy.”

Carisi flashed him a smile and his middle finger. 

“I love you,” Carvalho said.

“I love you too. No matter what happens today, we’ll keep fighting. Somebody signed in as you that morning, showed a fake ID with your name on it, and you’re innocent, so this fight’s not gonna end until we prove that.”

_And,_ Carisi thought, _because there are much more serious things to worry about in our lives than the stupid commentary emitted from the mouths of various Carisis, when this is over, I’m introducing you to my family as the man I love._

Rollins often teased him for “saying the quiet part out loud.” But his real problem sometimes was that he kept the out loud part quiet. 

“What do you have to say with regards to this new testimony, Ms. Novak?” the judge asked. 

“The people still maintain that there is sufficient evidence that Mr. Carvalho was present in the courthouse with a gun registered to him on the day of the shooting.”

Calhoun snorted. “Your Honor, our investigators have found that the registration was forged from an older one, and the only evidence the prosecution has that Mr. Carvalho was in the courthouse that day is his name in the security register. Someone could have signed in with a fake ID that had his name on it.”

“Seems like a stretch,” Novak said, but Carisi could see from his angle in the gallery that she was biting her lip and tugging at her blazer, perhaps starting to question the case too.

“I’ve filed this motion because given the sworn testimony —” Calhoun started to say.

“From the victim and the man who was originally charged with the crime,” Novak interrupted. “That’s hardly —”

“Given the new sworn testimony,” Calhoun repeated, “the prosecution is not going to be able to make a non-circumstantial case.”

“I agree,” the judge said. “I’m ordering all charges dropped. Ms. Novak, go back to the drawing board and re-file.”

Carisi watched Novak breathe out through pursed lips, almost as if she was relieved. He’d seen that same sort of relief in Barba before, when he was prosecuting a case on shaky evidence and wasn’t one hundred percent convinced of the defendant’s guilt. 

Novak left quickly. Carvalho clenched his fists, shut his eyes tight, and whispered _thank you_ to no one in particular. 

“Finally,” Calhoun said, patting Carvalho’s back and leading him towards the gallery, where Carisi was waiting. “The courts let this shitshow drag on long enough.”

The three of them walked out the back door together to avoid any press that might be lingering near the front steps. Outside, on the sidewalk, Carisi laid his hands on Carvalho’s forearms and then embraced him. Carvalho seemed surprised for a moment, then hugged Carisi back.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Carisi said, kissing Carvalho’s cheek.

When they broke apart, Calhoun clapped her hands together. “Hey, Carisi, good luck, because it’s your job now to make sure Andy doesn’t do anything stupid for at least ten years. Andy, I’m talking to my boss about an interview tomorrow. You can thank me by suing the city for wrongful, excessive prosecution.”

They said goodbye to Calhoun and walked off towards Foley Square together. “You need to get back to work?” Carvalho asked.

“Took the day off.”

“Really? I thought you didn’t have a lot of personal hours left.”

“I don’t,” he said, staring out at the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River sludging beneath it. “But I wasn’t sure how today was going to turn out, so I wanted … I wanted to be here for you, whatever happened.”

“My emotional support Sonny,” Carvalho teased, but there was a genuine, almost serious smile on his face. He leaned down and placed his lips close to Carisi’s ear. They were still walking. “I love you.”

Carisi turned to quickly kiss Carvalho’s lips.

Carvalho beamed.

“You want to walk over the bridge?” Carisi asked.

Carvalho nodded. As they crossed the river, he said, “Those first few nights we were together, I had to brace myself, because I fell really hard for you, and whenever I fall for somebody, it turns into a disaster.”

“You must have said, this guy’s a 37-year-old closet case who’s never —”

“No. Absolutely not. First of all, I thought you were 29.”

“Liar,” Carisi said, patting his silver-tinged coiffure.

“I’m glad we’re here.”

“I am too.”

“You’d be all right with me taking a job in the city? Rodrigo’s not going to hire me, since my links to Gardner make me too much of a liability.”

“Of course I’m all right with that.” He lowered his voice. “You know how much I miss you when you’re up in Albany?”

Carvalho hummed approvingly.

“When we get back to my place,” Carisi continued, “I’ll tell you all about what parts of you I miss the most when you’re not around.”

“Thank you for taking the day off. We’ll celebrate.”

“Yeah. And, for the record, I miss your face and your smile first, before all those other parts I miss a whole lot, so it’s good the charges were dropped and there’s a smile on your face again.”

—-

“Mr. Barba, you gave a witness what you called a “loan” out of your own pocket, covered it up for seven years, and continued to send money to the witness’s daughter after the witness died. Can you please address this?” the state senator representing Alex Muñoz’s former district said, haughtily shuffling papers in front of him.

“The initial loan was a mistake, although Ms. Abreu’s testimony helped us put away a violent criminal.” Barba knew he was fighting an uphill, if not entirely losing, battle as he was questioned by the state senators tasked with determining whether he was fit to be appointed as a criminal court judge. “I continued to give money to Ms. Abreu’s daughter so that she wouldn’t have to drop out of school.”

“Mr. Barba, what we need is assurance that the Abreu matter isn’t evidence of a pattern of behavior where you personally interfere in the cases you prosecute.”

“No,” Barba said, “these are unrelated incidents that occurred more than eight years apart.” _There are judges with on the bench with far more charges of prosecutorial misconduct on their records_ , he wanted to add, but there weren’t any judges on the bench who’d been nicknamed the “Baby Killer ADA” by the local papers, so Barba kept his mouth shut.

“Judge Torres retires in September?” one state senator said to another.

“Yes.”

“All right, Mr. Barba, we have a lot on our plate but this is something we need to discuss, especially given the media attention to your case and its aftermath, and the fact that the charge filed against you was murder, not misconduct.”

“That speaks more to Jack McCoy’s record,” another state senator chimed in.

“Give us three weeks.”

“Three weeks,” Barba repeated, wishing they’d simply told him no right away.

—

By early August, Barba had sold his co-op apartment so that he could settle the lawsuit that Mercy had filed against him back in February, when his trial was still in progress. He cut out of work early one afternoon so he could unpack the last of the boxes he’d shipped to Benson’s place.

He was surprised to find her home.

She greeted him with a kiss, fierce and passionate, and immediately unbuttoned his vest. Slipping her hands under his suit jacket, she wound her fingers around his suspenders.

“Good news?” he asked.

“No,” she said, pressing her forehead to his and breathing hard, heavy, almost furiously, “just more meetings, more waiting, more worrying. I don’t want to think, Rafa.”

He kissed her just below her chin and started to unbutton her blouse. “How much time do we have?”

She had to think about that for a second, that _how much time do we have_ , a loaded question these last six months —

“Until 4,” she said. “Lucy’s picking Noah up at 4, they’ll be home around 4:30, we need to give ourselves a buffer, please, please give me an hour where I don’t have to think.”

“Shh,” Barba said, cradling her head and gently kissing her lips, but that clearly wasn’t what she wanted today, because she kissed him roughly and pulled him into the bedroom by the waistline of his trousers.

She unfastened his suspenders and left them hanging off his shoulders, then loosened his tie but left it knotted. He started to unbutton his shirt, but she stopped him at the third button.

“Let’s pretend it’s last year and everything is good and we’re having a quickie on your office couch,” she said, stepping out of her pants and throwing them aside.

He laid down on the bed and smirked up at her when she straddled him and he slipped his fingers inside her underwear. “Did you get started without me?’ he asked, the smirk transforming into a wicked grin.

She nodded. He let out an “oh.”

She pulled his trousers and underwear down just enough, stroked him a few times, and sank down onto him.

“You really did get started without me.”

“I’ve been starting without you since — probably since the first time I saw you give a closing argument.”

“Is that right?”

“Mm-hmm.”

He shifted so that he was sitting, his forehead dripping with sweat since he was overdressed, but, oh, how that got her going.

He wrapped both arms around her back and hooked his mouth onto one of her breasts. They were rocking back and forth when he realized that behind her groans and “more, Rafa, more”s, his phone was ringing.

But that didn’t matter because one of her hands was in his hair, pulling just enough to make him pulse inside her, and she whispered, “yes, more, more,” into his ear and clenched around him and her hands tightened, and he let out a long, drawn out “O-liv-i-a,” and collapsed against the headboard, his shirt and vest drenched in sweat. 

She pressed her lips to his shoulder and caught her breath.

Still straddling his lap, she looked over at the phone he’d thrown hastily on the bed when her hands had gone for his fly. “Rafa, honey,” she said, out of breath, “were you expecting a call from the governor?”

“The ..?” He reached for his phone and she slowly lifted herself off of him.

He listened to the message in silence, rolling himself off the bed and standing so he could pull up his pants.

“What now?” she asked, her face falling.

He held out a hand as he listened to the rest of what the governor’s administrative assistant had to say.

“Liv,” Barba said, a smile on his face and tears in his eyes, “marry me.”

“What?” She let out a near-silent laugh and he cautiously lowered himself to one knee and took one of her hands in both of his.

“My grandmother had a ring. It’s at my mother’s place. I’ll get it for you if you want. Olivia Benson, will you marry me?”

“What the hell was in that voicemail?”

He rose up onto his feet again and held her face in his hands. “I went up to Albany a few weeks ago so the state senate could question me. I was appointed to be a criminal court judge. The appointment went through, it was approved, and I’m supposed to take the bench in December.”

She smiled a gorgeous, broad, happy-for-the-moment smile. “You did it,” she said. “Your dream. Your abuelita’s dream.”

“When I listened to that message, all I could think about was how I’d give up my dream in a second to make sure you and Noah stay together.”

“Dworkin and child services are working on that. You don’t have to give up anything.”

“But if I do, it’ll be Sheila Porter’s fault, and the court’s fault, and I’ll feel the staggering loss, sure, but I would give it all up in a second, a quarter of a second, to keep Noah safe.”

“You’ve never felt that way before,” Benson guessed.

“No,” he admitted. “Was my asking you to marry me too out of nowhere?”

“You’re overwhelmed. And you already agreed to marry me whenever I wanted, the day family court revoked — the day they did what they did — and, honey, I love you, you need to go be a judge.”

“I need to know you and Noah will stay together.”

“I told you, Dworkin’s handling it. You can’t give up a dream that you almost lost twice in a row.”

“For you and Noah, I’d give up anything. That’s what I’m trying to say.”

“You’d be giving up your dream for Sheila Porter. You can’t do that. You don’t need to do that. I love you too much to let you do that. Go call the governor’s office and take a shower.”

He did as she asked, signed up for an eight-week judicial institute that started at the end of the month, peeled off his suit and stepped into the shower. Just when he started washing his hair, Benson joined him.

“We’ve got fifteen minutes,” she said.

“I don’t think that’s enough time —”

“To shower, you fool,” she said, reaching for the shampoo and tapping his shoulder so he’d make space for her under the shower head.

“Let me?” he prompted.

“You’ll be sporting a —”

“I’m too old to rise to the occasion a second time so soon.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, looking at the evidence against her claim.

He soaped up his hands and ran them up and down her sides. “This is supposed to be efficient,” Benson complained, “which means you can’t just wash one part of me.”

He placed both hands on her ass and pouted. She laughed.

“Hey, Rafa?”

“Hm?”

“My answer’s yes.”

—

Carisi drew in a deep breath and raised one hand to knock on the door of a probably-illegal sublet on one of the beach-numbered streets in southeast Brooklyn. Holstered to his right side was a non-service pistol, one he’d purchased more than two years ago, when Dodds was killed and he was worried about Gary Munson’s friends nosing around him and the other detectives when they weren’t on duty. He’d meant to sell it. He should have sold it. 

His cell phone was in his left pocket.

This wasn’t an official police operation. If he had to call for help, he was screwed.

He knew there was a good chance he’d walk out of this without his badge, but he also knew that Sheila Porter could not be allowed to have custody of Noah, and the adoption had to be reinstated. He’d promised Benson that he’d make up for his mistakes. She wasn’t going to hold him to that promise, but he’d made the promise nevertheless, and if Carvalho had his rights restored to him, then Noah deserved the same.

He knocked on the door.

When Sheila opened it, her eyes grew wide and her face twisted in anger.

She yanked Carisi inside by the arm.

“Ms. Porter, I want to talk, to make you a simple offer,” he said.

“You’re screwing things up here, Detective. Stay out of it.”

“If you can tell me the exact nature of Trevor Langan’s involvement —”

Sheila gasped as if Carisi had said something horrendously offensive and backed up towards the metal desk that was the centerpiece of her makeshift office/living space in the studio apartment.

“All I need,” Carisi said, “is to know that Langan didn’t —”

She had a gun. 

He reached for his own weapon but wasn’t used to the non-NYPD holster and therefore wasn’t quick enough. She shot him in the thigh and he crashed to the linoleum floor, landing hard on his right hand before he found himself flat on his back.

His hand was swollen. He couldn’t draw his weapon.

Searing pains rocketed up and down his leg.

Sheila bent down, removed Carisi’s gun from its holster, and laid it on the desk. She pointed her own weapon at his face, then his chest, then his face again, as if she was deciding which would be more effective.

He thought that when he’d gone to her hideout, all he was risking was his badge.

“You heard how loud that gunshot was,” he said, suddenly registering that there was blood pouring out of his leg, “so somebody in this building, maybe everybody in this building, has called 911 by now. I can help you walk away from this, Sheila, I can help you walk away.”

“Bullshit,” Sheila said, deciding to keep the barrel of the gun pointed at his heart.

He managed to press the emergency button on his phone five times, just in case everyone in the building had simultaneously assumed the gunshot was the sound of a car backfiring.

“Listen to me, Sheila, if you run, I’ll tell ‘em there was a third person in here. I’ll tell ‘em that person grazed your arm and you ran.”

“Bullshit,” she repeated.

“Tell me what Langan was about, and I’ll make sure they don’t come after you.” He was sweating and shivering. “Tell me, or they’ll throw you in for life for killing a police detective.”

Sheila was hesitating. That meant Carisi had some time, as long as he didn’t pass out. He gritted his teeth and pushed through the worst pain he’d experienced in his life.

“I failed my daughter, I failed my grandson, so what’s the point? Might as well fail at witness protection too, is what I said when I lost Ellie. Look at this, just look, my grandfather would have been so proud.”

“Your grandfather never let himself or anybody who worked for him get charged with murder. He wouldn’t be proud. He’d think you were messy.”

“Oh, come on.”

Sirens wailed outside.

“You want out of this, I know you do,” Carisi said. “We’ll trade.”

“Langan was just like your boyfriend, got caught up in something right out of law school because he was stupid,” Sheila said. “Screwed up a defense, didn’t want to risk having to go into witness protection, liked making money. We used him every couple of years as a middleman for the adoptions.”

“And you paid him?”

Sheila kept the gun trained on Carisi as she stepped on his left ankle and glared down. They heard footsteps — running — echoing from the stairwell across the hall.

“No,” she said, “he wouldn’t take it. This was a mistake. I got scared. I don’t want to lose Noah.”

“Tell me why Langan pushed the adoption through, and then you can go out the fire escape and I’ll tell them there was a third guy.” He hoped the local precinct had someone stationed at the bottom of the fire escape.

“Langan didn’t know who I was. He didn’t know who I was when I hired him to represent Ellie. He didn’t know until the adoption was already in process.”

“So he did what he did to protect Noah?”

“Yes,” she said, “from me. He thought he had to protect Noah from me.” Her hands shook. Her finger was on the trigger, and Carisi was terrified, but he had to keep pushing forward, he had to stay conscious. “That’s what got him killed.”

Was that a confession? Carisi wondered, but the police burst in and Sheila ran for the fire escape and Carisi passed out as they loaded him into a stretcher.

He woke up in the ambulance.

A thousand questions were running through his mind: Had Sheila almost confessed to killing Langan herself? Had she killed him because he’d pushed the adoption through fraudulently in order to protect Noah from Sheila? If Langan was so interested in protecting Noah, why had he agreed to shoot Barba? What did the Masuccis have on Langan, what had they threatened him with, that had convinced him he needed to sign in at the security desk as Carvalho, shoot Barba on the courthouse steps, and then pass the gun to Householder?

“I need my phone,” Carisi said to the paramedic in the back of the ambulance.

“It was confiscated as evidence, the cops on the scene said.”

“Evidence,” Carisi groaned. “Give me yours. Police business.”

“I can’t —”

“Please,” Carisi said. “Did they get Sheila Porter?” He felt beads of sweat running down his forehead, shivers running up through his legs into his chest, and he worried that he wouldn’t stay conscious long enough to share what Sheila had told him.

“Yeah, I overheard them talking, they had her in custody of something, they know — I’m not supposed to —”

“I’m going to record a message on your phone and send it to Lieutenant Olivia Benson. She’ll keep you out of trouble.”

When the paramedic handed Carisi his phone, he realized that he must have been in really bad shape if he had conceded so quickly to the request.

Carisi recorded a quick video of himself describing what Sheila had told him about Langan. “She — she also said — she said “that’s what got him killed,” he managed to say, even though he knew that statement was inadmissible.

He sent the video to Benson, Rollins, and Fin.

Before he could ask the paramedic to tell his parents and sisters and Andy that he loved them, before he could tell Benson he hoped this meant the adoption would be reinstated even if he’d fucked up beyond all recognition by going to that studio apartment alone, he passed out again.


	13. Chapter 13

Bella Carisi stood in the doorway of the waiting room outside Mercy Hospital’s surgical unit, her eyes fixed on the elevator bank down a long, terrifyingly sterile hallway. Her parents were inside, sitting by an empty water cooler, clasping each other’s hands.

She spotted Andy Carvalho stepping off the elevator and ducked back inside.

Bella, Tommy, and their three-year-old son were the only members of the family who’d met Carvalho so far. Carisi had invited them over for dinner a few days after the charges against Carvalho had been dismissed.

“Ma, Daddy,” she said, wiping a stray tear from her cheek, “Andy’s here. We’re all the same amount of scared for Sonny, so please, please, _please_ don’t say anything stupid.”

Joanne rolled her eyes. 

“I don’t know how you could even say something like that to us at a time like this,” Dominick said, grasping the armrests of his chair as if he were on a plane amidst a turbulent takeoff.

Carvalho walked in, his shoulders falling when he saw Bella. She hugged him. “Sonny’s stubborn,” Bella assured him, “he’s gonna be all right.”

“I know,” Carvalho said, “I know.” His voice was breaking with worry. “We need him.”

Carvalho walked over to the Carisis and held out a hand. “Andy Carvalho,” he said, and Dominick stood and accepted his offer of a handshake.

“When, uh, Sonny’s better, you’ll come by the house for dinner,” he said, half suggestion, half tentative question.

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Gina wanted to be here,” Bella explained, “but she’s five months pregnant, so this isn’t any place for her. She really wants to meet you too.”

“Good. Good.” Carvalho’s eyes were sloping, his forehead wrinkled. Patting Bella’s forearm, he leaned in towards her ear and said, “I love him.”

“I know. Sonny too.”

“I’ve got to use the restroom, I —”

“There’s one across the hall,” Bella said, rubbing Carvalho’s arm. 

“Thanks.”

When Carvalho left, Dominick sat back down and Joanne stood. She started pacing, finally stopping when she found herself face-to-face with Bella. “He couldn’t’a told us this when he was 18 like everybody else?” she demanded.

“Ma. We’re not having stupid conversations today.”

“He broke a lot of girls’ hearts.”

“Ma,” Bella warned.

“I’m just saying —”

“You’re saying what? He dated women too.”

“ _I know that_ , I mean —”

“He was interested in women. Attracted to them. And we’re not talking about this.”

“That’s bullshit, and if you believe that for a second you’re —”

“This is so inappropriate, I’m gonna throw up.”

“Don’t be so goddamn dramatic.”

“Ma, sit down,” Bella insisted.

“Don’t tell me to —”

“Sit down before I say something I regret. Love your son and get those stupid stereotypes out of your head.”

Joanne blew a raspberry with her lips and let out a loud, forced laugh. “If you believe for a second —”

“You’re the one who always told us _if we don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all_.” Now Bella was glaring at her mother. “So sit the hell down and love your son.”

“I can’t believe you’d think for a second I don’t love him.”

When Carvalho returned from the men’s room, Olivia Benson was with him. Joanne still hadn’t sat back down. “What’d you send our son to walk into?” she demanded of the lieutenant. “I remember a couple years ago you sent a detective in your precinct into a house where he got killed, Sonny was lucky it wasn’t him.”

“Ma!” Bella shouted for the thousandth time that night. She’d never expected to see Benson stricken with a deer-in-headlights look, but Joanne made it happen. 

“Sonny was probably trying to help you,” Carvalho offered. “He felt so _guilty_ about what he’d done with the DNA swab and what the charges being dropped against me meant for your son.”

Benson smiled sadly. “That’s Carisi for you.”

It was another half hour before the lead surgeon came in to tell them they’d successfully removed the bullet from Carisi’s thigh. He’d lost some muscle and would wear a brace for several months, and because a few of the bones in his right hand were shattered, he’d need a second operation later in the week. Benson closed her eyes. “One day at a time,” she told Carvalho and the Carisis.

The surgeon said the family could see Carisi in the recovery room before he was moved to a hospital room for the night. Bella took her parents aside before they went in. “This is what you’re going to say to Sonny,” she instructed. “You say _I love you_ , you say _I’m so glad you’re going to be okay._ That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“No wonder Teresa was afraid to come down here tonight,” Dominick said. “You can’t tell people what to do.”

Bella gritted her teeth. Carvalho held up a hand as if to say _let it go, for now_.

“I’m sorry,” she told him when her parents were in the recovery room.

“My only concern right now is Sonny.” He hugged Bella again. “But thank you for running interference.”

Bella went in next and finally, Carvalho. (“He’s family,” Bella told the nurse.) When he was led into the recovery room, he found Carisi in a hospital bed, flat on his back, leg elevated, right arm in a temporary brace. He was crying.

“Side effect while he’s coming off the anesthesia,” the nurse whispered.

Carvalho wasn’t sure if that was entirely the case.

He went over to Carisi and held his left hand, looking down into his glassy eyes. 

“I love you,” he said.

Carisi smiled and more tears ran down his cheeks. “You were here with —”

“Bella ran interference. She’s a good woman.”

“I don’t know what I was thinking. I flushed my career down the toilet.”

“That’s not true.”

“I walked in there off-duty with a nonservice weapon to ask her —”

“As your attorney for the minute, can you not say that out loud, please?”

“Oh. Oh, yeah, that was stupid. Don’t let me talk.”

Carvalho laughed. “You did what you had to. You helped keep a mother and son together.”

“Not that IAB’ll care. I may be a little doped up here, but I know my statements on what Sheila said, the video I sent everybody, aren’t admissible.”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“Bella said I lost some of the muscle in my leg and I’m gonna need more surgery ‘cause my hand is shattered, so —” He coughed once and caught his breath. “I’m kinda screwed with my job either way, even if IAB doesn’t smack both me and my pension the hell out of there.”

“Sonny,” Carvalho said, a bit of a singsong tone to the name, “you have a law degree and you passed the Bar on the first try.”

“I know, I just —”

Carvalho bent down and kissed Carisi’s forehead, near his hairline. “I can see you as a prosecutor. An ADA.”

Carisi smiled. “I’ll see what they’ve got open in the fraud department.”

“I spent a few nights with a fraud ADA once,” Carvalho whispered into Carisi’s ear. “He was hot. And he had the longest legs you ever saw.”

“I have a feeling that guy was actually a detective.”

Carvalho laughed, squeezing the hand that he hadn’t let go of since he’d first approached Carisi’s bed. “I love you. Get some rest. I’ll come see you in the morning if you want.”

“Of course I want,” Carisi said, bringing Carvalho’s hand to his lips. “I love you. I didn’t know what it was like to be in love until I was with you.”

“Is that the anesthesia talking?” Carvalho teased.

“No. That’s me.”

—

Barba adjusted the visitor’s pass clipped to the pocket of his suit jacket and sat by the round table where two folding chairs had been set up. Sheila Porter’s crimes had crossed over state lines a handful of times and involved a sprinkling of RICO, which meant, thankfully, that she was in a federal prison and the guards staring at Barba from the corners of the room probably had no connection to the sector of the COs union in New York City that had tried for two years to get him killed.

The sector of the COs union that had very nearly been successful in getting him killed.

Sheila emerged from behind a thick metal door and sat opposite him. 

“You didn’t call your lawyer?” he asked. He was determined to do this right, even though he knew he was already doing it wrong, because he hadn’t told Liv.

“No,” Sheila said sharply.

“You can if you’d like.”

“Noah did not wind up in that house with those creeps when he was an infant because of me. He wound up there because Ellie’s pimp — Noah’s father — took him away from Ellie and left him there.” 

“I understand,” Barba said, licking his lower lip. 

“No, you don’t. You just want your girlfriend to be able to keep saying she’s Noah’s mother.”

“She’s been Noah’s mother for five and a half years.”

Sheila sighed with her mouth open. “Ellie is Noah’s mother.”

“That is also true,” Barba said.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to decide, of your own volition, to sign away your rights to Noah so that the legal bond between him and the woman who has raised him, the woman who has protected him, is as strong as possible.”

Sheila flashed him a vicious smile. “You’re going to be a judge in, what, a month? Are you sure this is a good idea, talking to me like this, Mr. Barba? In fact, your association with me could bring to light your father’s association with my grandfather.”

“Who my father was has nothing whatsoever to do with me.”

“Wouldn’t we all like to believe that about ourselves?” Sheila said, and although her question was pointed enough to hit Barba where it hurt, she’d unintentionally provided him a way in.

“You want that for Noah, too? You want Noah growing up thinking his fate is sealed by who his father was?”

“Stop.” Sheila rolled her eyes and folded her arms, looking at the wall instead of at Barba. “I’ll raise Noah in New Hampshire. I’ll even let him visit Olivia once in a while, all right?”

“What do you think child psychologists would say about taking a six-year-old away from the only person he’s ever known as his mother?”

She kept her arms folded. “Obviously, unless my lawyer’s a witch, I’m serving at least ten years anyway.”

“So then what do you want? If Liv loses custody, where do you expect Noah to live while you’re in prison?”

“With my friends in New Hampshire. I can’t reward the great and holy lieutenant who everyone adores so much for stealing my grandson.”

“You’re going to do more than ten years, you know,” Barba said. “You’ll be lucky if they offer you a plea deal. You killed Trevor Langan.”

“I didn’t kill him,” Sheila huffed.

“That’s not what you told Detective Carisi.”

“I’m not talking about that without my lawyer.”

“The feds think you might have had one of your cousins kill Langan. Murder-for-hire is still murder.”

“Ask Trevor about that,” Sheila said with a short laugh. 

“I have no sympathy for the man, except that he —”

“Except that the only “good” thing he ever did was take Noah away from me.”

“You learned from your grandfather how to fake a psychiatric illness so you wouldn’t get prison time for kidnapping Noah. You plan your crimes carefully.”

“What do you want from me?”

“The family court hearing’s been pushed back to December on account of your arrest. That gives you two and a half months to consider signing away your rights to Noah. A part of you is a good person who loves your grandson. A part of you knows how bad it’ll be for him if Liv loses custody altogether. That part of you has two and a half months to decide what to do next.” He flipped up the palms of his hands, a gesture to indicate that there was no pressure on her, that if she signed away her rights to Noah, it was all on her, all her decision. “Take care,” he said, struggling to keep his tone as even as possible.

He wanted to be careful.

—

Barba was on his way back from a judicial institute session in Westchester, slumped half-asleep at a window seat on MetroNorth, when a call came in from Dworkin. “You fucked up, Rafael,” Dworkin said before Barba could get out a _hello_.

“Excuse me?”

“Judge Walters, who’s handling our hearing in December, knows that you went to see Sheila Porter in prison and asked her to sign away her rights to Noah. Are you really that stupid?”

Barba’s heart jumped into his throat.

“We had a good argument for restricting Sheila’s parental claims to Noah, for keeping her permanently from petitioning for custody,” Dworkin said. “She kidnapped him, ducked sentencing on fraudulent terms, and continued running the adoption scam while under federal witness protection. Add to that her ordering a hit on the only attorney who tried to protect Noah from her, and we had the case in the bag.”

“I didn’t put any pressure on her. I told her she had two and a half months and that she needed to make the decision entirely of her own volition.”

“Doesn’t look that way to Judge Walters. You’d have been better off staying out of this and offering emotional support instead. Good luck at home tonight.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We had a solid case barring Sheila from ever having custody of Noah, until you interfered.”

—

Barba opened the door to the apartment slowly, tentatively, when he arrived home around 9. He wasn’t sure what to make of the silence. 

Benson was sitting at the dining table, her posture rigid, her fingers clutching the stem of a half-empty wine glass.

Barba shut the door behind him.

“Sit,” she said, her expression flat.

He sat. 

“I am going to try to stay as restrained as possible. This can’t turn into a screaming match.” She breathed deep through her nose, and he could see that her hands were shaking. “You can sleep on my couch for the next few nights. I want you out of here within two weeks.”

“I never meant —”

“Your intentions are irrelevant. What matters is what you did. You made a decision — you assumed you were the greatest lawyer in the word, that you could —” She wrinkled her nose and bit the inside of her cheek. “What matters is that you did something that made Noah less safe, and you _knew_ you were taking that risk, and you didn’t talk to me about it, so there’s no excuse. I can’t live with someone who is so full of himself that he puts my kid at risk.”

He felt the sting of his soul shattering into a million pieces.

“I love Noah,” Barba said. “All I wanted was to make sure he was safe from Sheila.”

“And as an ADA who’s about to become a criminal court judge, is it your place to do that?”

“No, but as his —”

“As his _what_?” she barked, all attempts at restraint flying out the window. “As his father? Funny slip of the tongue there. You’re lucky you’re not his father. Do you know how much worse it would have been if his own _father_ had screwed up his custody status?”

He warbled out an “I’m sorry.”

“I left a pillow and blanket on the couch for you. Please don’t cry, please don’t make this about you and how hurt you are, because this needs to be entirely about Noah.” There were sobs behind her words now too. “I can’t allow anyone who makes the world a less safe place for Noah — anyone who does that despite knowing better — into our lives.”

Barba stood. “I’m going to take a walk, give you time,” he said.

“No,” she snapped back. “This is simple. I don’t need time. The bad decisions you made impacted people’s lives when you stuck your nose where it didn’t belong — the witness you handed cash to out of your own pocket, the Householders — and I should have seen that there’s a pattern with you.”

Barba nodded, told her he understood, and walked out.

He didn’t know where to go. After walking for more than an hour, he wound up 36 blocks uptown at Rita Calhoun’s building.

Calhoun already knew about what he’d done, about how Judge Walters was rethinking the custody and adoption cases on account of Barba’s interference.

Barba braced himself for his longtime friend to curse his existence. “Raf,” was all she said before she let him in.

He sat on her couch and stared at his knees. Calhoun placed a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said.

“No choice words for me?”

“Maybe later. She kicked you out?”

“Said I could sleep on the couch. She wants me gone in two weeks. Rita, I was ready to get us all out of the country if Liv lost custody of Noah. A few months ago, she was on board with that. I thought she was on board with that.”

“A few months ago, nobody knew that Sheila Porter was Marla Masucci. Nobody knew that she was soliciting pregnant teenagers for an adoption scam and probably murdered Trevor Langan. Look, you’re my friend, and I’ll admit the pain in your face is kind of killing me in ways it shouldn’t, but Dworkin and Liv had a really good case, and the fact that you didn’t recognize that or even talk to Liv first — you were wrong, Raf, a hundred and one percent wrong.”

“I am full of myself,” Barba said.

“You’re a good man.”

“I won’t quote you on that.”

“A good man who’s full of himself, but _good_. Give her time. She’s scared, and she has every right to be scared.”

“She does.” He drew in a shaky breath. “But the look in her eyes tonight told me it was over for real.”

He tried to stay in control, but all the muscles in his face tightened, and he covered his eyes with one hand before he began to sob silently, fiercely, into his palm. His face burned, furiously hot, and when he looked up again, Calhoun was sitting beside him.

“Maybe,” he said, “I should resign from the criminal court bench in advance and find somewhere else to go.”

Calhoun pressed a hand to his back. “Don’t you dare,” she warned him. “Don’t you fucking dare.”


	14. Chapter 14

“Back up. Give him a minute.” The woman’s voice, coming from somewhere above Barba, seemed uncannily familiar. “He needs a minute, please.”

Barba blinked his eyes open. 

He was flat on his back on an outdoor couch, the sky above him was a clear and cloudless blue, the sun was shining on his face and burning the top of his head just a little, and it didn’t take him long to recognize where he was. 

“Rafael, how do you feel?” Claire Kincaid asked.

Up until now, she’d always spoken Latin in Barba’s recurring dreams about the Island of Discarded ADAs.

That concerned him a little.

He sat up slowly and noticed that he was wearing cargo shorts over his bathing suit. He’d always been barefoot in the dream, but now, he wore flip-flops. The white undershirt from the last few iterations of the dream had been replaced with a slightly thicker gray T-shirt.

Back in his room, the drawers and closers were probably overflowing with new clothes. 

He swallowed hard. 

Sonya Paxton, Alexandra Borgia, and Kevin Mulrooney were sitting on the deck next to the bar, all watching him intently. Connie Rubirosa was there too, sitting on a barstool she’d dragged onto the deck.

When Rubirosa spoke, he could only understand a word here and there.

“I suppose I’ve earned these shorts,” he said, sliding his thumb and forefinger across one of the snaps.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Mulrooney said, “you died on the courthouse steps in February.”

Horror and relief coursed through him at the same time.

“So that means Liv’s not going to lose Noah?” Barba asked.

Mulrooney and Rubirosa began speaking to each other in a language Barba couldn’t understand.

He realized that they were speaking English, that Mulrooney had never been killed in this iteration of the dream — if it was still a dream, but for the moment he wasn’t sure whether or not to hold out hope that he’d wake up — and was still the only ADA who’d bothered to learn Latin so that he could communicate with the ghosts.

Barba was dead, and Mulrooney wasn’t.

With Barba dead, with the hit having been successful, there would have been no reason for the Masuccis to put a second hit out on Mulrooney, who had no idea he was Rafael Barba Sr.’s son. 

“Aaron Householder shot you,” Mulrooney said.

“Nothing else ever came to light,” Kincaid assured him.

“Came to light? So that means —”

“Try not to think too much about what it means,” Kincaid said. “Do you want a drink?”

“No,” Barba said, shaking his head, “not right now.”

Kincaid returned to the bar, where she began polishing wine glasses, her own dejected look suggesting that she didn’t want to think too much either.

Barba struggled to swallow his emotions. During the last few months, the Island had felt like a lucid dream, but now he was back to square one, back to his original settings, back to the Blue Screen of —

“Enjoy it if you can,” Paxton said. “We’re all here for a while. The steakhouse is excellent, and the beaches are clean.”

Purgatory had clean beaches and good steaks.

“I want to —” he started to say.

“You know you can’t actually leave now, right,” Mulrooney said.

“Right. I just need to take a walk.”

“Rafael,” Mulrooney called after him, “you’ll be okay. You’ll adjust.” 

Barba headed out towards the water and let the cool waves crash against his ankles and knees. He stared out at the horizon, certain now that there was nothing on the other side.

“I love you,” he said out into the turbulent ocean.

He closed his eyes to blink away tears, and when he opened them again, he was on his back on Benson’s couch.

He heard himself shout before he was fully awake, fully conscious again.

Through the dark and through the remnant tears blurring his vision, he saw Benson watching from the doorway that connected the living room to the bedrooms, one shoulder pressed to the wall, arms folded across her chest. “You okay?” she asked in a low, hoarse whisper, her first words to him in three days.

He sat up and clutched the blanket that covered his legs. “Yes,” he lied.

She nodded and started to head back to her room, turning around when she was halfway there, returning to her spot in the doorway. “You sure?” she said, sighting as if she was performing an interpersonal duty, not reaching out to someone she loved.

“I’m fine, Liv. You and Noah are not. This isn’t about me.”

She went over to the couch — slowly, one foot in front of the other, her demeanor still marked by an air of reluctance — and sat with Barba, letting her fingertips lightly touch his back, over his undershirt.

“If it was just me, I’d say we could try to work it out.”

“But it’s not just you.”

“No.”

“I should never have gone in to talk to Sheila without running it by you and Dworkin first.”

“It’s too late now. We’ve been through this. And I hope you won’t do it again, not in your career as a judge, not with whoever you’re with next romantically. But your rash decision, your choice to communicate with Sheila without consulting _anyone_ before you did, that decision endangered Noah, plain and simple. I can’t move forward. I won’t risk it.”

He shut his eyes as tight as he could, then raised and lowered his shoulders. “I —”

“Don’t say it,” she warned.

“I was just going to say that I understood.”

“Right. We are probably both better off moving on after this.”

“I put my name in for a rental that opened up in my old co-op, and I’m looking at another place tomorrow. I’ll be out by next week.”

She opened her hand so it was flat against his back. “Like I said, if it was just you and me —”

“I get it, Liv, I promise. Believe me, the last thing I’d ever want to do is make a child less safe. That’s why I never became a father.”

“I’m sorry you still have nightmares,” she said, and briefly, too briefly, she slid closer and ran a hand through his hair, nudging his head towards her shoulder. “I’m sorry.” He could hear that she was crying. “I’m sorry, Rafa, I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”

She stood and returned to her room. “I love you,” he whispered too softly for her to hear.

—

After his next judicial institute session, Barba went directly downtown to his office, which was already half packed up, ready to move to what would become his chambers three floors down. He’d so far successfully suppressed the urge to make a run for it.

He imagined his grandmother saying _Dame una cosa, solo una cosa, para no decepcionarme_. 

_Give me one thing, just one thing, not to be disappointed in._

And some nights, like this one, when he had his fisted hands shoved into the pockets of his trenchcoat, early fall breezes transforming into wind tunnels when they met downtown Manhattan’s supposed architectural marvels, he imagined that his grandmother was looking out after Noah.

His next stop was Forlini’s, where he was surprised to find Andy Carvalho sitting at the bar, supping a scotch and scribbling on a legal pad.

“Working hard?” Barba asked, taking the seat next to Carvalho’s.

Carvalho laughed. “Rita warned me that as a criminal defense attorney in Jack McCoy’s county, I’d spend half my time on trial prep. Had a lot more plea deals in Albany. How are you doing?”

“Don’t make me answer that.”

Carvalho ordered Barba a scotch of his own. “I get why Liv did what she did, but she’s not being entirely fair to you.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. How’s Carisi?”

“He’s getting there. Hopped across the floor of the physical therapy center at racecar speed yesterday.” Carvalho touched his fingertips to the rim of his glass and spun it on the table. “His parents are visiting now, so for the moment I’m better off here.”

“That’s what you get for sleeping with a 20-year-old.”

“Fuck off,” Carvalho said with another laugh. “He’s almost forty and almost entirely gray.”

“Ask him sometime about the mustache he had when he started at SVU.”

“I’ve heard stories. Rollins has some good ones.”

“So I take it you’ll be in the city for a while?” Barba asked.

“As soon as I’m sure I won’t be fired from my new job, or won’t be framed by my boss, I’m going to look for a place for me and Sonny. A place with an elevator and a decent-sized bedroom.”

“Oh? Putting down roots and everything, I see.”

“You know my bad luck.”

“I _have_ your bad luck,” Barba reminded him. 

“You never slept with anybody who took down all your clients or got engaged to someone who was scamming clients out of thousands of dollars in fees.”

Barba rubbed his eyes. “You don’t know, Andy, you don’t know how badly in the last week I’ve wanted to head for the hills, for friends in Miami, or on the West Coast, you don’t know.”

“You’d run when you’re this close to being _el juez_?”

“I’m confident I’ll fuck that up too.”

“I told you, I don’t think Liv’s being entirely fair.”

“You’re wrong.” Barba licked his lip and took a drink, letting the scotch burn his throat.

“Abuelita Catalina wasn’t.”

“Stop that.”

“I’m saying —”

“You pull the Abuelita Catalina _el juez_ card, I’ll pull the Papai Julio _o juiz_ — wait, wait, _juiz no Supremo Tribunal_ — card.”

“And then I’ll throw down the _damn it, you can’t pronounce Portuguese words to save your life_ card.”

“Mm,” Barba said, raising the glass to his lips. “You should learn Latin. Take it from a guy who had a near-death experience.”

“I never wanted to be _o juiz_ , Carvalho said. “I like arguing people into corners. You always wanted to be a judge. When we were on the law review —”

“So little of that matters now.”

“It should still matter.”

“My name is Rafael Barba,” he said, looking up at the bottles lining the shelves in front of him, “what can I do?”

“Tell me you don’t believe for a second that your mistake is in any way equivalent to what your father did to you and your mother.”

Barba took out his wallet and slapped a ten dollar bill down on the surface of the bar. “Thank you for the pep talk, Andy, but you should get back to your amorcito before he tries to grow another mustache.”

“You should have seen him when he somehow grew a full beard after only four days in the hospital.”

“Also terrible?”

“Noo,” Carvalho said, raising his eyebrows. “It’s an image I’ve filed away for, uh, downtime, in fact.”

“Good night, Andy.”

“Raf, just promise me, _promise me_ , you won’t bail when you’re this close to your dream.”

“I won’t,” he assured his friend.

“Good, because otherwise I was going to have to drag Rita into this.”

“Rita’s already warned me.”

They walked out together. “Just another two weeks, right?” Carvalho said.

“Until what? Liv said I have to be out by —”

“Until you’re a trial judge.”

“Oh.” Barba shrugged. “I promise I’m not going anywhere, I promised Rita too, but honestly, this thing I’ve been after since I was 21, all of a sudden it feels like a hollow victory.”

—

Dworkin was waiting for Benson outside her office at 9 o’clock in the morning. “How long have you been here?” she asked, using her key to open the door.

“Fifteen minutes, give or take an hour.”

“I can’t handle any more bad news right now.”

“It’s not.” He plopped his briefcase down on her desk, flipped it open, and handed her an envelope. “In fact, if Judge Walters and the feds say it’s good news, this may indeed be good news.”

Benson opened the envelope and removed a letter — a three-page letter — a three-page, single spaced letter written by Sheila Porter and, per the first paragraph, not under duress and in full consult with her attorney.

In the letter, Sheila relinquished her rights to Noah, acknowledging that her active link to the Masucci crime family and her disavowal of witness protection made Noah a target if he were to be in her care. She did not admit to any crimes other than her participation in the adoption scam, but did address Trevor Langan’s fraud.

_In the presence of and under the advisement of my attorney, I affirm that Trevor Langan was aware of my activities and most likely pushed the adoption through despite knowing that I was Ellie’s mother, because he was legitimately concerned about Noah’s safety if he were to be under my care._

And, at the end of the letter: _I relinquish my parental claim and parental rights to Noah and will affirm this in from of New York Family Court at your request._

“So this is, what, a trap to get her out of federal prison for an afternoon?” Benson asked. “They have her appear before Judge Walters, and then when we’re not looking she suddenly escapes from custody with the help of her cousins?”

“Liv, my friend,” Dworkin said, taking the letter back, “you and I both know the Masuccis have been mostly kaput since 1999. They don’t have their fingers in the city’s pie anymore. Other than a couple of hit jobs here and there —”

“Like the ones that killed Kevin Mulrooney and Jules Hunter, and almost killed Barba?”

“They don’t have their sticky fingers in the courts anymore.”

“Why don’t you ask Fred Gardner about that?”

“Gardner was operating mostly upstate and in New Jersey, and what he did was only so the Masuccis could keep their gambling and adoption operations profitable. I’m not saying we should count our chickens before they hatch, but Sheila’s appearing before the court in two days, and this looks good for us.”

Benson groaned.

“What?” Dworkin said. “I said _good_. It looks good for us.”

“Whenever something looks good, it’s not.”

“Hold tight,” he told Benson, “48 hours.”

She agreed to wait and see, and not fall into a well of despair before despair was entirely called for.

When she came home that night, most of Barba’s things were gone. He’d texted her: _Didn’t get the apartment, 2nd in line on waiting lists for two others, so I’m crashing on Rita’s couch until one comes through. Living out of suitcases until then._

She didn’t respond.

“Mom,” Noah said when they were sitting on the couch together watching TV, a little past his bedtime, “why’d you kick Uncle Rafa out?”

“Who told you that?”

“Aunt Amanda.”

“Well, then, Aunt Amanda and I need to have a talk.”

“She didn’t tell me, not really, I under — underhand — that thing you always tell me not to do.”

“You overheard.”

“Yeah. When she brought me and Jesse to see Uncle Sonny.”

“I’m sorry, sweet boy.”

She loved Barba, but in light of what he’d done, in light of how he’d undermined their very solid case against Sheila Porter, she felt no love in her veins, just hollowness, when she thought of him now. It wasn’t even anger or resentment anymore, just an acceptance of the fact that anyone she let into her heart and her bed invariably hurt her, or Noah, or her colleagues in some way. Maybe it was bad luck, but she was quickly learning to accept bad luck and move on once again.

Noah flung his arms around her.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

She smiled and relished her son’s embrace. Her son, who still didn’t know that the adoption had been vacated three months ago, who had no idea that the courts might separate him from the woman he clung to now on account of the only decision Trevor Langan ever made that might have given the defense attorney a chance at heaven: he’d glossed over Sheila’s existence to ensure that Ellie’s son would be safe from the Masuccis.

—

The only major bump in the road came when Judge Walters ordered Noah brought to court for the hearing. “My guess?” Dworkin said. “He wants to see if Sheila still agrees to relinquish her parental rights with Noah still in the room. Something of a jerkass move on his part, but I’m still hopeful.”

So they did what Walters asked and brought Noah to court.

Sheila looked over at him, sitting in the gallery with Rollins, then said something to her lawyer under her breath. She assured Judge Walters that she’d meant every word in her letter.

The judge took Benson and Dworkin aside in his chambers to let them know he’d schedule a hearing in two weeks about reinstating the adoption. 

As Benson emerged from chambers, Noah came running towards her, crashing into her arms.

“Mom,” he said loudly into her ear, “does this mean Uncle Rafa can come home now?”

Benson looked up at Rollins, who was mid-cringe.

“Sweet boy,” she said, “we’ll talk when we get home.” All that mattered to her in that moment was that she and Noah were going home together.


	15. Chapter 15

Gina Carisi went into labor on a Friday afternoon in early December, and gave birth to a baby girl at one o’clock on Saturday morning. Bella, who’d stayed with Gina throughout the labor and delivery and was half-asleep herself, texted her brother the only good two-AM text he’d ever received in his life. 

On Saturday morning, Carvalho sat next to Carisi on the couch, took his hand, and inched a bit closer so that their shoulders were touching. When Carisi turned to face him, Carvalho dipped his head to kiss Carisi.

“Bella said we can see Gina this afternoon,” Carisi said, his lips still brushing against Carvalho’s, “so we don’t have time for canoodling.”

“Christmas is in three weeks,” Carvalho said, a seeming non-sequitur.

“We don’t have to wait ‘till _Christmas_ ,” Carisi teased.

“Sonny,” Carvalho said, his expression serious, “I love you.”

“I love you too. I’m not going anywhere.” He knew how Carvalho worried ever since he’d waited nervously for him to come out of surgery after he’d been shot by Sheila. “I’ll be working for the DA. Nothing to put me in excessive danger anymore, I promise.”

“I’m stupid and impulsive when I’m in love, so for Christmas, I bought us a pair of rings.”

“Rings,” Carisi repeated.

“If I were to ask you to marry me, if I proposed to you on Christmas Eve, would you be ready for me to do that? We’ve only been together nine months, and I know how it is for you with your family, so I’m not going to ask the question if you’re not ready.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Carisi said. “I’m ready.”

“You are?” Carvalho said, a hint of pleasant surprise in his voice.

“Ask me now.”

“I had a plan to —”

“Ask me now, and then ask me again on Christmas Eve.”

“Sonny Carisi, will you marry me?”

“Yes.” He leaned in for another kiss. “As long as you marry me too.”

“Always.”

When Bella called back to let them know that Gina was ready for visitors, Carisi called Barba to invite him along. “She’s your niece,” Carisi reminded him. “You and I, we’re both this baby’s uncles. We’re family now.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Yes. You’re at Rita’s? We’ll pick you up in two hours.”

When they arrived at the hospital, Gina’s room was already full, with Joanne and Dominick Sr, Teresa and Mia, and Bella and Tommy. Gina stood flamingo-like on one leg in front of the bed, nursing the baby.

“She’ll only latch when I stand on one leg,” Gina said. “We can’t figure it out.”

“Already a Carisi, making life unnecessarily difficult,” Bella said with a smirk.

“Watch it,” Joanne warned. Then, looking up at Barba, “who’s this?”

“Ma, you remember Rafael, he helped Tommy in court. He and Kevin were brothers, had the same father, had no idea until only a couple of months ago.”

“Oh,” Joanne said, “so you’re the baby’s uncle.”

“Yes.”

“How are you, Andy?” she said, turning her attention to the man standing next to Barba.

“All right, thank you, Mrs. Carisi.”

When Teresa opened her mouth to say something, Mia grabbed her hand. “Let’s go get something from the cafeteria, okay, Mom?”

“Sure,” Teresa said, taking the hint as Mia led her out of the room. That made space for Barba, Carisi, and Carvalho to step all the way in.

Gina put her foot down on the floor and sat at the edge of the bed, still cradling the baby. “See?” she said. “Whenever I sit down and rest, she doesn’t want to eat anymore.”

Barba pressed his back to the wall. “She’s part Barba,” he said, “so she’l be hungry all the time soon, trust me.”

“Grace,” Gina told the baby, “this is your Uncle Sonny, Uncle Andy, and Uncle Rafael.”

“Beautiful name,” Carisi commented.

“Yeah, I named her after Kevin’s mom. His dad — Harry — said it was all right. He left a couple minutes ago, actually. I’m glad he wants to be in her life too. Her name is Grace Olivia. No, uh, offense, Rafael, I just liked the name.”

When Barba flinched, Bella added, “You’re in this family now where nobody ever minds their own business even though everybody’s always shouting _mind your own business_ at each other.”

“Let’s give everybody a little more room,” Joanne said, nudging her husband. “We’ll be back soon, when it clears out. You need room in here, in case more friends come by or if your aunt and uncle show up.”

The crowded room was silent for a few moments after Joanne and Dominick Sr. left.

“Hey, Andy,” Bella said, patting Carvalho’s arm, “you’re part of this family too.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” Gina told him, “that’s why Grace is gonna call you Uncle Andy. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Speaking of that, I have a stupid question I’ve been thinking about for a while. Do you guys want my wedding reception?”

Carisi and Carvalho looked at each other. 

“I mean, not to push you in any direction or whatever, but Kevin and I had a hall booked for February, and I never cancelled because then I’d lose, like, sixty percent —”

“We’ll take it,” Carisi said.

“Sonny’s starting a new job next month, so I’ll see if I can negotiate them to let us push the date to April or May,” Carvalho said. “But, yes, we’ll take it.”

“May’s a popular month for weddings,” Gina warned.

“I’m a defense attorney. I can negotiate.”

Bella clapped her hands. “You two responded to that real quick,” she said. “Is there something you want to tell us?”

“No,” Carisi said, “‘cause we’re not about to steal Gina’s thunder, and nothing’s happened yet.”

Gina laughed. “I don’t care if you add more thunder to the mix.”

“But nothing’s happened yet. Talk to us at Christmas.” 

“You’re _engaged_ ,” Gina said. 

“Not yet,” Carisi said. “Andy’s going to ask me at Christmas and then we’ll all pretend to be surprised.”

“All Ma wants for you, you know, all Ma wants for any of us, is a wedding, so this’ll make her happy, especially since you’re taking my reception and you’re going to have a big party.”

“That’s not so great an attitude either,” Carisi said, “as Kevin tried to tell us when I first met him. But we’ll take what we can get.”

—

The morning after Grace Olivia Mulrooney was born, Noah Porter Benson’s adoption was reinstated in family court. Benson took the day off to spend with her son. Although the situation might have been bittersweet, given her falling out with Barba after his actions nearly tanked their case against Sheila, Benson felt no pain, no regret in that moment, because _she had her son_ , and that was not only a victory but a necessity.

She came into work as usual the next morning and holed herself up in her office to catch up on the mountains of paperwork that had piled up during the last few weeks. The first knock on her door didn’t come until three hours in, when her eyes were already glazing over. “Come in,” she said, and Carisi opened the door, then quickly shut it behind him.

“How’s the paperwork going, Lieu?”

“You came all the way here just to ask me that?” She stood up from behind her desk and wriggled her fingers, inviting him into a hug. “It’s good to see you out and about.”

“I had a meeting this morning with Jack McCoy and the EADA,” Carisi said, “and I wanted you to be the third” — he set one of his crutches against the wall and started counting on his fingers — “fifth? sixth? to know —”

Benson’s eyes lit up. “Dodds just called to let me know we’re getting a new ADA because Stone doesn’t have the right energy to work with this department. Are you telling me —”

“I’m telling you,” Carisi said.

“When?” Benson asked, delighted.

“January. Right after New Year’s.”

“This is such good news. This is the good news we all need right now.”

“I got more for you,” Carisi said, removing his phone from his jacket pocket and scrolling through his pictures. “This is my new niece. Her name’s Grace Olivia.”

“Rollins told me,” Benson said, looking over Carisi’s shoulder. “Is that — oh, that’s right, he’s her uncle, isn’t he.” The comment came out a bit flatter than it should have, and she knew Carisi registered her tone. “I’m glad they’re doing well.”

“He’s —”

“I don’t want to know, all right?”

“I got you.” Carisi propped his other crutch against the wall and sat on the couch beneath the window that looked out on the squadroom. “I can tell you something where you’d be the first to know.”

“I don’t want to hear about Barba, at least for the next few weeks. Don’t get me wrong, I know he’s been through a lot, but right now, I have to focus on protecting myself and Noah.”

“No, this is about me.”

“Oh?”

“Andy asked me to marry him.”

Benson covered her mouth with her hand and smiled with her while face as she sat down next to Carisi. “And you said —”

“I said yes. I’m in love with him. Look,” he said, patting his leg, “I know you’re still my lieutenant until I start working for the DA in a couple of weeks, so it’s not my place, but let me tell you, when Sheila shot me and my leg was bleeding and my hand was broken and she had that gun aimed at my chest — life is short, Lieu. We want to believe it’s long and we can change our minds about things in cycles every 12 years or whatever, but we don’t know how much time we’ve got, and we don’t know how much time we’re wasting, so what I’ve learned is, you can’t live according to the judgments of other people who are aiming at their own real narrow version of heaven and nothing else.”

“I’m so happy for you,” she said. “When’s the wedding?” 

“I’ve got to get settled in my new job and Bella’s running some interference for us with the family, but we’re going to figure to it out soon, because we’re both exhausted and we want to have a party.”

“Okay. First of all, I want a front row seat at your wedding. Second, here’s what you’ve got to understand about what happened between me and Barba. Regardless of the outcome, which was lucky —”

“Goddamn lucky for you and Noah, I agree.”

“You did an incredibly stupid but also incredibly heroic thing by confronting Sheila about who she really was. You brought out into the open that Langan, however corrupt he might have been, was taking desperate measures to protect Noah from Sheila because he knew something that the rest of us didn’t. I don’t know what they had on him that was so bad that he felt he _had_ to shoot Barba for the Masuccis that day, or maybe he was just a bad guy who did one good thing in his life. But Barba endangered Noah when he went to talk to Sheila in prison, when he asked her to sign away her rights, something that could easily be read as a threat.”

“And me going to her with a non-service pistol can’t?”

“IAB cleared you since you never drew it. You went rogue and it was bad, but you had a full picture of the situation you were dealing with. Barba acted without knowing that Dworkin already had Noah’s custody case in the bag. He delayed us by weeks and caused a lot of extra grief and worry. What he did went completely against legal advice.”

“Again, what I did also went completely against legal advice.”

“But you had the whole picture in front of you. Barba overlooked the possibility that everything was already taken care of in family court. Has Fin ever told you about what happened to Dani Beck?”

“Who’s that?”

“She was a detective assigned to this unit when I was doing undercover work in the Pacific Northwest around twelve years ago. There was a foster child who was part of a case. Beck was warned not to take her home. The child’s psychiatrist, a social worker, and Dr. Huang all told her that this was an extremely rare case where a child did not belong in an individual or family setting. Beck didn’t listen, she did her own thing, and the child set Beck’s apartment on fire in order to kill both her and Beck so they could be together forever. She endangered every single person in her apartment building by taking that child home against the advice of psychiatrists and social workers. Even my former partner was furious at her, and he’d had a thing for her for a while, because she followed her gut against the advice of three professionals. When I look at the people who I’ve let into Noah’s life, into my own life, I think about Dani Beck, even though I didn’t know her.”

“But what does that really have to do with what Barba did?”

“I told you, she endangered every single person in her apartment building. She was so traumatized that she left SVU and eventually NYPD altogether. All I can say is, at least, at the very least, she _was_ traumatized. There are people who do things like she did, put others’ lives at risk, and aren’t bothered by it at all. You see what Noah’s been through. You’ve been there for a lot of it. So I take every possible precaution.”

“All right.” Carisi ran a hand through his hair, stopping before he flattened it too much. “I had to make my case, Lieu, ‘cause Barba and I are family now.”

She let out a puff of air, almost a laugh. “I suppose you are,” she said, “through that beautiful little girl.”

“It’s sad, though.” Carisi folded his arms and shook his head. “Gina was always pressured to be all these things she wasn’t, and she played along ‘cause it got her what she thought was love and respect from our family and all the neighbors and friends, but she didn’t know what being in love really was until she was with Kevin. And then that was cut short so quickly, pulled out from under her. You never know, Lieu, you never know how much or how little time you’ve got.”


	16. Chapter 16

_A hollow victory_ , Barba thought as he zipped his black judicial robe until only his shirt collar and the knot of his tie were peeking out. In front of the mirror in what would officially become his chambers the following Monday, he combed the graying hair near his temples. A hollow victory, but a victory nevertheless, he reminded himself.

The bullet encased in glass on his desk promised him that was true, no matter how brokenhearted he was over the error in — well, judgment — that had led to him losing Liv.

A victory, even though his mother was furious at him for what he’d done. “How dare you put Liv’s son in danger like that,” she’d said, and Barba had been kind enough not to point out the irony in that accusation. 

“You don’t know what it did to her when she found that plane ticket and your letter of resignation,” Lucia said. “You don’t know how she cried that day.”

“I didn’t know because I was in the hospital dying of a gunshot wound, Mami.”

She’d hugged him and told him that she loved him, that his abuelita would have been proud, but that it would be a long time before Lucia herself could get past this screw-up so soon after what he’d done earlier that year, the last time he’d interfered in a family’s custody case.

“Mami,” he’d said, the remnants of his broken down soul tickling his insides as they slid down to his soul. Lucia was crying. 

She was conflicted. He’d grant her that.

Of course he _did_ know, in a sense, how Liv and cried when she’d found the letter and plane ticket, how she’d wailed that afternoon, how she’d sobbed into her pillow late at night in her bedroom. As much as the Island and his escape from it had been a dream, as much as he could not have possibly yachted his way out of purgatory, what stuck with him was the crying. 

How Liv had wailed. How Lucia had sobbed loudly. Carisi’s rhythmic sobs that came and went in fits. Yelina Muñoz, crying in whimpers that she didn’t want anyone else to hear, that she’d never admit to. Eddie Garcia weeping as he prayed for Barba’s life. That was what Barba couldn’t get out of his head, the one part of the dream that — all these months and therapy sessions later — still didn’t feel like a dream. 

“We did it, Abuelita,” he said, mostly to himself. He rapped his hand quickly against his desk. “Thank you for being here. No one else is, but that’s all right, we’ll call this a victory anyway.”

_You will be._

A victory, anyway.

He walked out into the courtroom, which was mostly empty save for a few clerks, and waited for the senior judge who would swear him in. Barba, as a last-minute replacement for a retiring judge, didn’t get to be sworn in by the mayor (which he was somewhat glad for, because at least the ceremony would start on time). He imagined Abuela Catalina sitting in the gallery, a sense of pride in her eyes that he wasn’t sure he deserved.

The sound of footsteps and crutches hitting the floor snapped him out of his stupor. He looked up to see Carvalho, Carisi, and Carisi’s sister Gina in the gallery. Rita Calhoun followed behind them. 

Barba shuffled into the gallery to greet them. “There was no need to —” he started to say, but Calhoun cut him off with an explosive laugh that bordered on a snort. 

“25 years, you think Andy and I would miss this?” Calhoun said. 

“Rafael,” Carisi said, reaching out to pat Barba’s arm, “you’ve been a good mentor. You’re part of the reason I’m going into the DA’s office in January.”

“Gina,” Barba said, offering her a smile. 

“I wanted to come not just because you helped out Sonny and Bella and Tommy, but ‘cause we’re family.” 

Barba considered that for a moment: Gina Carisi and Kevin Mulrooney’s daughter was probably Rafael Barba Sr.’s only biological grandchild, unless the elder Rafael Barba had more kids out there, a possibility Barba couldn’t put past his father. 

“And ‘cause this is the first time you’ve had a chance to leave the house since Grace was born,” Carisi teased.

The Honorable Elana Barth showed up a few minutes later, hugged Barba, and jokingly told Carisi that he wasn’t in the “club” since he hadn’t been shot in the courthouse. “My bullet’s still in evidence, anyway,” Carisi said, as if that was something worth bragging about.

“When they release it,” Barth said, “I’ll have a glass case made up for your desk too, ADA Carisi.”

The senior judge arrived, introductions were made, and Barba prepared to be sworn in. He stood behind the bench, ready to take the oath of office. 

As he began — only a few words in to the oath — the courtroom door opened and in walked Olivia Benson, accompanied by Noah, and behind them, Lucia Barba. They sat together in the gallery.

Amidst his promises to serve the court and the justice system, he looked out at Liv and Noah, who were beaming up at him, a sight he’d never thought he’d see, a sight he thought he no longer deserved to see.

Benson dabbed at the space beneath her eyes. Noah was grinning. Lucia had a hand over her heart. 

When the senior judge finished swearing him in and welcomed him to the bench, Barba hurried back down to the gallery. 

Benson stood and met him halfway. She reached her arms out to him and pulled him into a fierce embrace, her hands on his back pushing their bodies, and their hearts, closer together.

“I failed you and Noah,” he said into the curve of her ear, “when all I had to do was talk to you, to Dworkin, to anybody who was directly involved in the custody case.”

“Come home,” she said, not letting go.

“Home,” he repeated. 

She moved back an inch or two, maintaining the embrace by keeping her hands on his elbows. “Two weeks ago, Sheila Porter relinquished her rights to Noah in front of Judge Walters. I’m still angry with you for what you did, and I need you to promise me you’ll never act on your own whims like that ever again when a family is at stake.”

“I promise.” He kissed her temple, then wrapped his arms around her. “I love you. I promise.”

“Come home,” she said again.

“Yes. I’ll come home.”

Noah tugged at his mother’s blazer. “Is Uncle Rafa coming home?” he asked.

“After the hearing,” Benson said, wiping a cheek with the back of her hand, “after Grandma Sheila said that she was going to keep Noah safe” — that was how she’d framed the hearing for Noah, and that was how she spoke about it in front of him — “Noah’s first question was _does this mean Uncle Rafa can come home now?_ ”

Barba knelt down to Noah’s level and embraced the boy. “Do you want me to live with you and your mom again?”

“Yes,” Noah said.

“I really like living with you and your mom, more than anything else in the world.”

“Grandma Sheila said she’s going to keep me safe by letting me stay where I live now.”

“Good. And mom will keep you safe, and so will I.”

“All right, everybody,” Calhoun announced, “we’re all going out to celebrate the fact that The Honorable Rafael Barba will no longer be sleeping on my couch.”

“The Honorable Rafael Barba,” Benson said, a smile spreading across her face.

“The Honorable Rafael Barba!” Carisi echoed.

“What’s that mean?” Noah asked.

“It’s what you call a judge,” Barba explained. “It’s called an honorific.”

“And,” Lucia said, biting her lower lip almost as if she were hesitant to continue, “it means your Uncle Rafa is an honorable man.”

“Do I have to call you The Honorable Rafael Barba?” was Noah’s next question. 

“No, of course not,” Benson said. “He’s still Rafa and Uncle Rafa to us.”

When they all walked out together, Lucia touched her son’s shoulder and leaned in close. “He should call you Papi,” she said, half under her breath.

“Mami, shh, now’s not the time.”

“The Honorable Papi.”

Barba rolled his eyes but reached down to squeeze his mother’s hand.

He promised himself that he’d spend the rest of his life making sure he’d live up to the title, the _distinction_ , of The Honorable Rafael Barba.


End file.
